The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research Quality
- Uwe Flick - Freie Universtität Berlin, Germany
This Sage Handbook presents an interdisciplinary collection of chapters exploring how to assess the quality of collecting and analysing qualitative data, while maintaining a focus on diversity, digital and critical approaches. The Handbook considers essential questions such as what is good qualitative research? What makes qualitative research good research? And, how can we make qualitative research better research?
Contributions come from a wide array of experts, and highlight answers to questions from various disciplinary and geographical areas; from mixed methods to multimodal and online research, from specific types of data and methods to specific target groups, and from theoretical and epistemological contexts to those where funding has an impact on how research is done and assessed.
Qualitative research has evolved in many respects in recent decades and has grown increasingly multidisciplinary. Research in general is facing new challenges around how to take diversity and decolonisation into account in what researchers do, as well as how to produce and communicate qualitative research quality. This Handbook offers a timely overview of such developments, and will support researchers involved in planning, designing, doing and evaluating qualitative research in developing an increased sensitivity for contemporary debates and challenges in the field.
Part I Philosophies and Epistemologies of Qualitative Research Quality
Part II Disciplinary Discourses of Qualitative Research Quality
Part III Qualitative Research Quality for Specific Approaches
Part IV Rethinking Qualitative Research Quality for Specific Methods and Data
Part V Rethinking Strategies for Quality in Qualitative Research
Part VI Rethinking Criteria for Quality in Qualitative Research
Part VII Extending Contexts and Challenges for Qualitative Research Quality
This is undoubtedly an important, long-awaited and necessary book for qualitative research. Recognizing the complexity of the issues involved in qualitative research quality, this book shows the variety of answers, by situating them in the theoretical and epistemological backgrounds where they have emerged. It also provides researchers and students with the tools to think through their own research practices in a more mature and enlightened way. Certainly a must!
Research quality is the prime consideration for any methodology and in qualitative research it is also one of the most elusive and hotly contested. This impressive handbook, the latest from Uwe Flick, an international authority on qualitative methods, is contemporary – with themes of diversity, decolonisation, and digital resources threaded throughout the contributions – and closely reflects the increasing multidisciplinary presence of qualitative research. Compelling scholarship and the handbook’s genuinely global reach make this a crucial resource for students and practitioners of qualitative research across the social sciences and for those who fund or evaluate qualitative studies.
As ever this is an immensely valuable edited collection expertly steered by Uwe Flick, a gift to the qualitative research community. Established arguments and new directions coexist seamlessly together. Anyone seeking to gain a strong contemporaneous sense of “how to locate the crossroads” of scholarly reflections bearing on qualitative research will not be disappointed by this Handbook’s emphasis on rethinking and extending knowledge and pedagogy. I am also very encouraged to dig deeper than on first reading to appraise and anticipate where issues covered are demonstrably beneficial for practicing researchers keen to capitalise on this set of authors’ efforts and direction-taking.
Professor Uwe Flick is a leading figure in qualitative inquiry who has published several excellent collections that are now seminal in the field. His current venture is masterful. The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research Quality sets new standards for assessing quality in the field with a diverse collection of chapters that offer something for everyone engaged in qualitative inquiry. This handbook offers an invaluable resource for emerging and established scholars and practitioners.
