Handling Qualitative Data

This book provides helpful tips and easy-to-follow guidelines for carrying out rigorous qualitative data-collection and analyses. Lyn Richards’ straight to the point explanations of various techniques and methodological procedures can help novice students and seasoned researchers conduct systematic qualitative research.

Strengthening an already impressive publication, Richards has produced an excellent addition to the literature on qualitative research. The signposting of additional resources within the text allows readers to further hone their analytical skills. Written in an accessible format, I would recommend this to both experienced researchers and those beginning their research journey. 

About the author

Lyn Richards has a highly unusual range of relationships with qualitative research. After undergraduate training as a historian and political scientist, she moved to sociology. Her early work as a family sociologist addressed both popular and academic audiences, with a strong motivation always to make the funded research relevant to the people studied, and the qualitative analysis credible to those affected. Each of her four books in family sociology was a text at university level but also widely discussed in popular media and at community level. During her tenure as Reader and Associate Professor at La Trobe University in Melbourne, she won major research grants, presented and published research papers, was a founding member of a qualitative research association and taught qualitative methods at undergraduate and graduate level, supervising Masters and PhD students.

She strayed from this academic pathway when challenges with handling qualitative data in her own studies led to the development, with Tom Richards, of what rapidly became the worlds leading qualitative analysis software. They founded a research software company, in which for a decade Lyn was Director of Research Services, writing software documentation and managing international training of researchers and trainers in the methods behind the software. Designing and documenting software taught her to confront fuzzy thinking about methods, and to demand straight talking, clarity of purpose, detail of technique and a clear answer always to Why would we want to do that? Teaching methods to thousands of researchers in dozens of disciplines in 14 countries, she saw what worked and what didnt. From those researchers, graduates and faculty in universities and research practitioners in the world beyond, she learned their many ways of handling data, on and off computers, and their strategies for making sense of data.

Handling Qualitative Data is a direct result of this experience. It offers clear, practical advice for researchers approaching qualitative research and wishing to do justice to rich data. Like her previous book, with Janice Morse, Readme First, for a Users Guide to Qualitative Methods it strongly maintains the requirements of good qualitative research, assumes and critiques the use of software and draws on practical experience of helping researchers whose progress has been hindered by confusion, lack of training, mixed messages about standards and fear of being overwhelmed by rich, messy data.

Throughout this hybrid career, Lyn continued contributions to critical reflection on new methods, as a writer and a keynote speaker in a...

Part 1 Setting up Chapter 1 Setting up your project Chapter 2 Qualitative data Chapter 3 Data records Part 11 Working with the data Chapter 4 Up from the data Chapter 5 Coding Chapter 6 Handling Ideas Part III Making sense of your data Chapter 7 What are you aiming for? Chapter 8 Searching the data Chapter 9 Seeing a whole Part IV Telling it Chapter 10 Getting it together Chapter 11 Writing the project report Chapter 12 Telling it