Qualitative Research in the Time of COVID: Lessons Learned and Opportunities Presented During a Pandemic focuses broadly upon educational issues during the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapters make note of how contextual understandings are important for the future of researchers, especially when those contexts involve inequality made more acute since the pandemic. The chapters illustrate the importance of creating a climate of care based upon the principles of care ethics, and also examine projects that could be taken in the context of necessary self-care during challenging times. Chapters address the climate of caring in both in-person and online educational spaces and what it means to support students in an expanded conception of classroom space. In discussions ranging from exemplars of arts-based, personal narrative to completing a dissertation during a pandemic, chapters share both the immensity of the challenges and the rewards of productive and meaningful work both domestically and internationally. In the context of the living taking place after the pandemic’s coming into being as an event, this volume humbly offers writings as documents of remembrance of our historical present, offering with the hope that the historical may continue to move forward with an ethics of care ever in the foreground. Qualitative Research in the Time of COVID is perfect for such courses as Qualitative Research, Qualitative Inquiry, Ethnography, Teacher Education, Action Research, and Educational Research.

Empirical data is one of the cornerstones of knowledge in the social sciences, and yet the researcher often takes it for granted, reserving his or her imaginative faculties for finding a theory that ′fits the data′. This revealing account of the theory-data relationship calls this faith in data into question and establishes a reflexive framework and vocabulary to explore the creative, political and philosophical elements of data production. Rather than thinking about the theory-data ′fit′, Alvesson and Karreman will encourage you to consider the research process as one of theory-data interplay, asking if creative empirical material can challenge established theory and inspire new lines of development, and if breakdowns and mysteries encountered in research can be a constructive rather than destructive process. They will encourage you to think critically about empirical data in terms of construction rather than verification, and most importantly they will encourage you to develop theory that is interesting and novel, rather than naive or irrelevant, making this title essential reading for those who often find the traditional vocabulary and frameworks of social science research obvious or simplistic.

′This text will be of great use to postgraduate researchers in education, social work and nursing, and any practitioner involved in carrying out research with children and young people′ - CPD Update ′[T]here is a sense of newness and innovation about the book, whereby the reader is treated to insight into the life and work of collaborators who wrote each case study....[T]he book is highly accessible for students at graduate and undergraduate level, for example BA (Hons) Early Childhood Studies students′ - ESCalate Researching with Children and Young People covers every stage of the process of doing a research project, from research design and data collection, through to analysis and writing up. The book is divided into three sections, in which the authors cover: - Introducing research and consultation with children and young people - Collecting and analysing data - Whole-project issues. Each chapter includes activities, discussion questions, tips and extended case studies to help the reader to engage with the material and investigate the practical implications. This text will be of great use to postgraduate researchers in education, social work and nursing, and any practitioner involved in carrying out research with children and young people.

Based on real case studies, this is the first practical guide to rapid ethnographies, exploring their history, design and implementation.

All researchers want to produce interesting and influential theories. A key step in all theory development is formulating innovative research questions that will result in interesting and significant research. Traditional textbooks on research methods tend to ignore, or gloss over, actual ways of constructing research questions. In this text, Alvesson and Sandberg develop a problematization methodology for identifying and challenging the assumptions underlying existing theories and for generating research questions that can lead to more interesting and influential theories, using examples from across the social sciences. Established methods of generating research questions in the social sciences tend to focus on ′gap-spotting′, which means that existing literature remains largely unchallenged. The authors show the dangers of conventional approaches, providing detailed ideas for how one can work through such problems and formulate novel research questions that challenge existing theories and produce more imaginative empirical studies. Constructing Research Questions is essential reading for any researcher looking to formulate research questions that are interesting and novel.

Is there more to qualitative data collection than face-to-face interviews? Answering with a resounding 'yes', this book introduces the reader to a wide array of exciting and novel techniques for collecting qualitative data in the social and health sciences. Collecting Qualitative Data offers a practical and accessible guide to textual, media and virtual methods currently under-utilised within qualitative research. Contributors from a range of disciplines share their experiences of implementing a particular technique, provide step-by-step guidance to using that approach, and highlight both the potential and pitfalls. From gathering blog data to the story completion method to conducting focus groups online, the methods and data types featured in this book are ideally suited to student projects and other time- and resource-limited research. In presenting several innovative ways that data can be collected, new modes of scholarship and new research orientations are opened up to student researchers and established scholars alike.

In an era of constrained research budgets, online interviewing opens up immense possibilities: a researcher can literally conduct a global study without ever leaving home. But more than a decade after these technologies started to become available, there are still few studies on how to utilize online interviews in research. This book provides 10 cases of research conducted using online interviews, with data collected through text-based, videoconferencing, multichannel meetings, and immersive 3-D environments. Each case is followed by two commentaries: one from another expert contributor, the second from Janet Salmons, as editor.