Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five Approaches - Softcover

"Creswell does an excellent job categorizing the various qualitative methods into five approaches: narrative research, phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, and case study...The author has expanded on and updated the information he presented in the first edition of the book (Creswell, 1998), including discussion of the various schools of thought that have developed among qualitative researchers since the mid 1990's...Qualitative Inquiry & Research Design: Choosing among five approaches is a highly informative book; researchers will likely return again and against to the book as they expand their comfort zone within qualitative research." 

                                                                                —Peggy M. Delmas, University of Alabama (Peggy M. Delmas National ACademic ADvising Association 2007-12-07)

"This introductory research text [...] covers five approaches to qualitative research and compares them side-by-side. [This book] covers the basics in qualitative research; content which can easily be adapted to suit the needs of budding applied linguistics researchers [as well]." (Gary Barkhuizen New Zealand Studies in Applied Linguistics 2009-03-13)

The Second Edition of this bestselling text once again explores the philosophical underpinnings, history, and key elements of each of five qualitative inquiry traditions: narrative research, phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, and case study. Written in an accessible style, this book relates research designs to each of the traditions of inquiry. The author compares theoretical frameworks, ways to employ standards of quality, and strategies for writing introductions to studies, collecting data, analyzing data, writing a narrative, and verifying results.

New to the Second Edition:

- Broader coverage of narrative research

- Updated coverage of data analysis, which accounts for programs like Atlas.ti and NVivo, and discusses counting codes more fully

- More specific steps for doing research within each tradition