Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing Among Five Approaches

"Creswell does an excellent job categorizing the various qualitative methods into five approaches: narrative research, phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, and case study...The author has expanded on and updated the information he presented in the first edition of the book (Creswell, 1998), including discussion of the various schools of thought that have developed among qualitative researchers since the mid 1990's...Qualitative Inquiry & Research Design: Choosing among five approaches is a highly informative book; researchers will likely return again and against to the book as they expand their comfort zone within qualitative research." 

                                                                    —Peggy M. Delmas, University of Alabama

“Creswell has produced an even more outstanding and valuable text for qualitative research than the First Edition.” 
                                                                    —Edith King, University of Denver

Like the bestselling First Edition, this new version explores the philosophical underpinnings, history, and key elements of each of five qualitative inquiry approaches: narrative research, phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, and case study. Using an accessible and engaging writing style, author John W. Creswell compares theoretical frameworks, ways to employ standards of quality, and strategies for writing introductions to studies, collecting data, analyzing data, writing a narrative, and verifying results.

John W. Creswell is a Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He teaches courses on mixed methods research, qualitative inquiry, and general research design. In these three areas, he has authored numerous scholarly journal articles, book chapters and books. He is currently working on his 22^nd book (including new editions), and his books are translated into many languages around the world. At Nebraska he founded the Office of Qualitative and Mixed Methods Research and has held the Clifton Endowed Chair. He also co-founded the SAGE journal, the Journal of Mixed Methods Research, and has been a popular speaker on mixed methods and qualitative research in the US and abroad. As an applied research methodologist, he served as an Adjunct Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Michigan and as a consultant for the VA health services research unit in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As a methodologist, he helped to design the methods for a number of successful NIH and NSF projects. He has been a Senior Fulbright Specialist scholar to both South Africa (2008) and Thailand (2012) lecturing on qualitative and mixed methods approaches to research. Recently, he served as a co-leader of a national working group developing “best practices” for mixed methods research at the National Institutes of Health in the US. Visit him at his Web site: johnwcreswell.com.