rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_f0c85e2c-ccbf-520e-93c8-34d77e45f865">2.2 Planning and Preparation
2.3 Being Realistic: Resources and Constraints
2.4 Ethics and Informed Consent
2.5 Accommodating Researcher Biases and Pre-existing Theory when Planning a Study
2.6 Summary and Checklist: Planning a Study
3.1 Approaches to Sampling
3.2 Sampling in Practice: Recruiting Participants
3.3 Sampling in Practice: Negotiating Access
3.4 How Many Participants?
3.5 Summary and Checklist: Recruiting Participants
4.1 The Role of the Researcher
4.2 Observation
4.3 Think-Aloud
4.4 Semi-structured Interviews
4.5 Focus Groups
4.6 Diary Studies and Autoethnography
4.7 Working with Existing Sources
4.8 Summary and Checklist: Data Gathering
5.1 From Buckets to Causal Narratives: Different Approaches to Coding and Analysing Data
5.2 A Pragmatic Approach to Analysis
5.3 Tools for Qualitative Data Analysis
5.4 Thematic Analysis
5.5 Illustrative Example
5.6 Top-down Approaches to Analysis
5.7 Summary and Checklist: Analysing Data
6.1 Research Paradigms
6.2 Research Strategies
6.2.1 Basing a Study on a Particular Theoretical Perspective
6.2.2 Theory Shaping Analysis
6.2.3 Ethnomethodology
6.2.4 Contextual Inquiry
6.2.5 Participant Observation and Action Research
6.2.6 Grounded Theory
6.3 Mixed Methods and Staged Approaches
6.4 Responding to the Situation
6.5 Summary and Checklist: Study Shaping Issues
7.1 Communicating Quality through Reporting
7.2 Summary and Checklist: Reporting a Study
8 Ensuring Quality in Qualitative Research
8.1 Starting with the Basics
8.2 Building Quality into the Process
8.3 External Validation: Inter-rater Reliability, Triangulation and Respondent Validation
8.4 Summary and Checklist: Quality of Qualitative Research
9 Conclusions and Further Resources
9.1 Qualitative Research: A Space of Possibilities
9.2 Further Resources
9.3 Going behind the Scenes
Acknowledgments
This book owes its existence to the many students and researchers we have worked with over the years. It builds on an earlier chapter on Semi-Structured Qualitative Methods published by the Interaction Design Foundation (Blandford, 2014), and a few sentences from that text may have made it through into this one unscathed.
We cannot list everyone who has shaped and challenged our thinking about qualitative methods: there are too many, and we would be sure to forget someone important. We thank you all. Suzanne Amos, Ellie Burgess, Imogen Lyons, Nikki Newhouse, Olga Perski, Sheila Pontis and Kathy Stawarz gave constructive feedback on an earlier draft of this text; many thanks! Paul Cairns, Marc Hassenzahl, Jesper Kjeldskov, Helena Mentis and Mark Perry have made excellent suggestions for improving this manuscript; we have addressed as many as possible of their recommendations, but remaining limitations are our responsibility. Emily Blandford and Smaragda Magou have delivered illustrations that surpass our rather limited graphic design skills. Aisling O’Kane and Atish Rajkomar have given permission to include photographs from studies led by them. Our research has been funded by EPSRC, ESRC, MRC, SSHRC and NIHR.
Preface
The motivation for writing this book came from several different directions. The key driver was that there has not been a good text that we could direct our students to that resonates with their interests and the problems they are addressing. There are some excellent texts from the social sciences and from healthcare, but they do not deal with problems of interaction design, user requirements or user experience
