Matthew B. Miles

Professionally, I work a lot with quantitative data, through mathematics/biostatistics, building software, and research design. The world of words has long been a domain that has enchanted me even though symbols have comprised my main language. Recently, my wife has started graduate work using qualitative methods. I decided to fill my deficits in this world by reading this book. I am by no means expert or even experienced in it, but I merely have an interest.

This book seems to be the seminal work in its field. The authors share their wisdom and experiences in this accessible textbook, now in a fourth edition. They cover the entire process from design and data collection to building a theory. They talk at length about coding as well as how to present your data. They even have a chapter on writing, with many encouragements to not be boring!

The graphics and illustrations in this book are excellent and inspirational. I am always interested in creating visualizations to communicate research data effectively, and this book provided many muses in that regard. They talked about converting written accounts into concept maps and linking those to address “influences and affects” of a weak sort of causality. This book helped slow my mind down about the many moving parts in qualitative research so that I can focus more on a work’s reality and substance.

This book is obviously geared towards researchers, whether new or old. The writing and presentation are accessible enough so that graduate students would be well-served by reading this work. Practitioners, of course, can benefit as well, but they likely would have read one of the prior three editions of this book. Those who, like me, are involved in other parts of the research enterprise can learn about their colleagues’ work, too. Finally, those who spend significant time building visuals to communicate concepts can learn from these authors’ analytical techniques.

After finishing this work, I’m inspired about the myriad of ways non-quantitative data can be analyzed and concisely communicated to readers – especially in ways that aren’t written prose. Poetry, artful presentations, summarizing graphics, and matrix-tables together can create a mosaic to comport meaningful and accurate understanding to readers. My personal bar has been raised, and I suspect many other readers’ bars will be, too.… (més)