Collecting Qualitative Data: A Practical Guide to Textual, Media and Virtual Techniques

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.

Virginia Braun is an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland. A feminist and critical psychologist, she has researched and published extensively on gender, bodies, sex/sexuality and health. She is co-author of the award-winning textbook Successful Qualitative Research (2013) as well as numerous other methodological works. Notably, with Victoria Clarke, she developed an approach to thematic analysis that has become a very widely used qualitative method in the social and health sciences.

Victoria Clarke is an Associate Professor in Sexuality Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol. She has published three prize-winning books, including most recently Successful Qualitative Research (2013). She has conducted ESRC and British Academy funded research on family and relationships, and has published over 70 papers on topics including appearance psychology, human sexuality, LGBTQ psychology and qualitative methods. With Virginia Braun, she developed an approach to thematic analysis that has become a very widely used qualitative method in the social and health sciences.

Debra Gray is a Reader in Social Psychology at the University of Winchester. She is a critical social psychologist whose work explores the intersecting areas of social, political and environmental psychology. She has published widely on many topics relating to participation in political, community and health settings and collective socio-spatial identities and intergroup relations. She has an ongoing interest in the intersection of research and practice, and works with many third-sector and public-sector organisations. She has expertise in a wide range of qualitative methods, and she is interested in creative (and multi-modal) ways to collect, analyse and use qualitative data.