Students, academics and professionals in qualitative research methods, interpersonal communication, sociolinguistics, sociology and anthropology

Narrative inquiry refers to a subset of qualitative research design in which stories are used to describe human action. This book contains current ideas in this field of research, and will be of interest to qualitative researchers.

A concise volume aimed at researchers and academics in sociology, anthropology, psychology and interpersonal communication.

Quantitative Narrative Analysis focuses on the following issues: 1. the fundamental features of narrative (as a specific type of text genre with certain invariant linguistic properties); 2. how the invariant properties of narrative can be used to structure narrative information in ways that basic qualitative information can then be analyzed quantitatively (story grammars, or Subject-Action-Object and respective modifiers, such as Time and Space of Action); 3. reliability (and how the computer and linguistic framework of the approach greatly increase data reliability); 4. data analysis (the book does not focus on general problems of data analysis, it will show how textual data can be analyzed with numbers).

Using lively examples and friendly tips gleaned from his own and other researchers' experiences, and a warm, reflective writing style, Harry F Wolcott offers readers suggestions for writing up qualitative research.

Understanding and Evaluating Research: A Critical Guide shows students how to be critical consumers of research and to appreciate the power of methodology as it shapes the research question, the use of theory in the study, the methods used, and how the outcomes are reported. The book starts with what it means to be a critical and uncritical reader of research, followed by a detailed chapter on methodology, and then proceeds to a discussion of each component of a research article as it is informed by the methodology. The book encourages readers to select an article from their discipline, learning along the way how to assess each component of the article and come to a judgment of its rigor or quality as a scholarly report.

Provides: an historical overview of the development of the narrative approach; a guide to how narrative methods can be applied in fieldwork; how to incorporate a narrative approach within a field project; guidelines for interpreting collected or produced narratives; and useful guides for further reading.