Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials

Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials, Fourth Edition is Volume III of the three-volume paperback versions of The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, Fourth Edition. This portion of the handbook considers the tasks of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting empirical materials, and comprises the complete handbook’s “Part IV: Methods of Collecting and Analyzing Empirical Materials” and “Part V: The Art and Practices of Interpretation, Evaluation, and Presentaion.”

Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials, Fourth Edition introduces the researcher to basic methods of gathering, analyzing and interpreting qualitative empirical materials. Part 1 moves from narrative inquiry, to critical arts-based inquiry, to oral history, observations, visual methodologies, and autoethnographic methods. It then takes up analysis methods, including computer-assisted methodologies, focus groups, as well as strategies for analyzing talk and text. The chapters in Part II discuss evidence, interpretive adequacy, forms of representation, post-qualitative inquiry, the new information technologies and research, the politics of evidence, writing, and evaluation practices.

Author Biography

Norman K. Denzin was Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Communications, College of Communications Scholar, and Research Professor of Communications, Sociology, and Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. One of the world’s foremost authorities on qualitative research and cultural criticism, he was the author or editor of more than 30 books, including The Qualitative Manifesto; Qualitative Inquiry Under Fire; Reading Race; Interpretive Ethnography; The Cinematic Society; The Alcoholic Self; and a trilogy on the American West. He was past editor of The Sociological Quarterly, co-editor of six editions of the landmark SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, co-editor (with Michael D. Giardina) of 18 books on qualitative inquiry, co-editor (with Yvonna S. Lincoln and Michael D. Giardina) of the methods journal Qualitative Inquiry, founding editor of Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies and International Review of Qualitative Research, editor of four book series, and founding director of the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. 

Yvonna S. Lincoln is Professor Emerita at Texas A&M University, where she held the Ruth Harrington Chair of Educational Leadership and was Distinguished Professor of Higher Education. She is the coeditor of the journal Qualitative Inquiry, coeditor of the first through six editions of The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, and coeditor of The SAGE Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies. As well, she is the coauthor, editor, or coeditor of more than a half dozen other books and volumes. She has served as the President of the Association for the Study of Higher Education and the American Evaluation Research Association, and as the Vice President for Division J (Postsecondary Education) for the American Educational Research Association. She is the author of coauthor of more than 100 chapters and journal articles on aspects of higher education or qualitative research methods and methodologies.