Qualitative Research: Issues of Theory, Method and Practice

This book assembles a team of internationally-renowned researchers who share a commitment to rigorous qualitative research concerned with how social worlds are constructed. The contributors reflect on the analysis of various types of qualtiative data – observations, interviews, focus groups, documents, talk, visual data and the internet – using helpful case-studies.

New to the Third Edition:

• Includes new important topics such as using grounded theory, working with secondary data, systematic reviews, writing qualitative research, gender research, ethical issues, qualitative data analysis
• Presents new, exciting authors including Kathy Charmaz, Catherine Riessman and Clive Seale
• Offers new study features including internet links, chapter summaries and questions to readers
• Provides a more practical, student-friendly, focus on the pragmatic issues of doing qualitative research from defining a research problem through to data analysis, writing up, and applying qualitative research to social problems

David Silverman trained as a sociologist at the London School of Economics and the University of California, Los Angeles. He taught for 32 years at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is interested in conversation and discourse analysis and he has researched medical consultations and HIV-test counselling.

He is the author of Interpreting Qualitative Data (Seventh Edition, 2024) and A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Qualitative Research (Second Edition, 2013). He is also the editor of Qualitative Research (Sixth Edition, 2026) and the Sage series, Introducing Qualitative Methods. In recent years, he has offered short, hands-on workshops in qualitative research for research students and faculty at universities in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.

Now retired from full-time work, David aims to watch one hundred days of cricket a year. He also enjoys voluntary work in an old people’s home where he sings with residents with dementia and strokes.