This Second Edition of Lyn Richards' best-selling book provides an accessible introduction to qualitative research for students and practitioners. Recognizing that for many new researchers dealing with data is the main point of departure, this book helps them to acquire a progressive understanding of the skills and methodological issues that are central to qualitative research.

Lyn Richards provides clear and pragmatic guidance on how to handle, reflect on and get results from small amounts of data, while at the same time showing how a consideration of methods and their philosophical underpinnings informs how we should best handle our data.

This book also covers all the processes of making, meeting, sorting, coding, documenting and exploring qualitative data, smoothly integrating software use and the discussion of the main challenges that readers are likely to encounter. It guides novice researchers to achieve valid and useful outcomes from qualitative analysis, and to ensure they do justice to their data.

New to this Edition:

• Increased coverage of issues about the researcher’s relation to their data and ethical implications
• An expanded section on preparing for data collection and reflecting on the nature of data.

A password-protected Instructor Teaching Site and an open-access Student Study Site are available for this book at http://www.uk.sagepub.com/richards/ and includes the following resources:

• Live, detailed case studies of qualitative methods in practice, linking to publications and illustrative material. Researchers tell the stories of projects, from design, through what was actually done with the data, to how analysis was achieved and reported;
• A software guide with links to information and tutorials in several products.