Provides researchers and students with a step-by-step guide to planning qualitative research. This book presents an approach to the components of design and how they interact with each other. It presents a strategy for creating coherent and workable relationships among these design components and highlights key design issues.

This book gives researchers and students a user-friendly, step-by-step guide to planning qualitative research. Based on a course that the author taught for 7 years at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, it is written in an informal, jargon-free style and incorporates many examples and hands-on exercises. Rather than the rigid, linear approach to design usually found in research methods textbooks, which is particularly unsuited to qualitative research, the book presents a flexible, systemic model of design. This model not only better fits what experienced qualitative researchers actually do, but provides a clear framework for designing a study and developing a research proposal. This edition includes new or substantially expanded discussions of research paradigms, defining a research problem, site and participant selection, relationships with research participants, data analysis, and validity, as well as more examples and exercises.