Product Description

`This is a superb book. It covers the broad sweep of current qualitative work, while being appropriately selective and always on the side of quality. Its clarity is faultless, and its introduction of the various relevant concepts is neatly integrated with an excellent set of exercises which will bring them alive. David Silverman has written the best general textbook in qualitative methods; I shall use it in my teaching' - Jonathan Potter, Loughborough University

`This is an elegant text on the cutting edge. David Silverman has taken the most recent developments, methodologies and interpretive strategies in qualitative research and made them immediately accessible to the student' - Norman Denzin, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

`The Second Edition... is a fascinating book.... It includes enlightening discussions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, of discourse analysis and ordinary talk, as well as of what can be learned from visual (non-linguistic) materials' - David Kalekin-Fishman, Forum for Qualitative Social Research

In this much expanded and updated Second Edition of his bestselling introductory textbook for the beginning researcher, David Silverman: takes account of the flood of qualitative work since the 1990s; includes a new chapter on Visual Images; and provides an expanded treatment of discourse analysis.

All chapters have been substantially rewritten with the aim of greater clarity and to take into account the growing interdisciplinary interest in qualitative research. To aid the student researcher the number of exercises has been increased and Key Points and Recommended Readings appear at the end of each chapter.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #276452 in Books
• Published on: 2001-02-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 344 pages

Review

"This is an elegant text on the cutting edge. David Silverman has taken the most recent developments, methodologies, and interpretive strategies in qualitative research and made them immediately accessible to the student." 

About the Author
David Silverman is Professor Emeritus, Sociology Department, Goldsmiths College and Visiting Professor, Management Department, King’s College, University of London. He is author/editor of many top-selling qualitative books for Sage London: Interpreting Qualitative Data, 2/e (2001), Qualitative Research Practice (2004), Qualitative Research, 2/e (2004), and Doing Qualitative Research, 2/e (2004). He is also series editor of Introducing Qualitative Methods.

Customer Reviews

Toward Scientific Credibility in Qualitative Research
As a research student whose thesis proposal tends to the qualitative approach, I found this book very interesting and useful. It is a helpful textbook to elucidate the fundamental conceptions of qualitative research. The book covers a range of topics from introducing essential skills in generating researchable questions to the methods for analysing qualitative data. As the title indicates the main theme of the book is about the scrutinizing of qualitative data. Certainly, data interpretation is a vital stage in any research study. All researchers try to select the most credible tools to interpret the collected data. Many statistical techniques are utilized to interpret quantitative data but, analysing qualitative data need different tools.
Apart from the value of the book’s contents we can enumerate two main reasons that indicate the benefits of this book more obviously. Firstly, the number of publications about analysing qualitative data is much less than the existing resources on the subject of quantitative data. While qualitative approach in many studies particularly, in social sciences, contributes in developing our knowledge considerably, the number of comprehensive resources introducing the basic notions of this area is not in plenty. Therefore, any profound and comprehensive publication can be very helpful for researchers. Secondly, various statistical test and techniques and also different computerised programs such as SPSS assist researchers to interpret quantitative data more satisfactorily. However, researchers may encounter many challenges in analysing the conceptual and subjective data in the qualitative studies. Therefore, carrying out a qualitative study requires specific knowledge about the methods of examining qualitative data and this book can provide the readers with basic awareness and skills for this purpose.
The contents are very clear and understandable with profound meanings. Four major methods used by qualitative researchers including observation, interview, analysing text and transcribing naturally occurring interaction are explained and discussed. The book contains three parts including ten chapters and there is a very good consistency among the chapters.
At the end of each chapter you will find a summary of most important topics of the chapter as the key points. It helps readers to remember the key issues of each chapter. In addition, the readers are provided by recommended reading for further delve into the topics. Also there are a number of exercises to practice the learnt materials. These are a few examples of this book’s features which make it more suitable for the readers. In general, it is a helpful textbook particularly, for postgraduate and research students in different fields of social sciences.