Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Average Customer Rating:

Very thorough; very useful

Customer Rating:

I used the book in a practical setting, while planning a workshop. The workshop was to develop field workers' skills and methods for community-based impact assessment of drinking water projects in Africa. While much of the content was too detailed for my immediate purposes, for someone coming from a non-social science background this detail was valuable in giving me a framework. I found the language used to be clear, though some of the terminology was unfamiliar, and the wealth of illustrations and examples helped me to understand fairly readily the complex subject material. So, whilst it was not an instant cook book, it certainly provided me with the means to design my own recipes.

Practical guide to 'real' qualitative analysis

Customer Rating:

I come from a social science background and found this book invaluable when doing my PhD. My dog-eared copy is testament to the fact that it is a very useful and practical book. It's the kind of book that you pick up and look through when you are desperately trying to make sense of a mass of qualitative data staring you in the face! This is one of the only textbooks on qualitative analysis to give real guidance and procedures to follow, from organising your data to reporting and presenting them. What is does not give you (and the authors are very up front about this) is a step by step guide to qualitative analysis: if you are looking for 'The Idiot's Guide to Handling Qualitative Data', then this book is not for you. Miles & Huberman expect you and want you to think about the problem you are investigating, and this means planning your analysis before you even start your research! The book is well set out, although sometimes, by trying to be helpful and giving you many options about how to handle your data, you can feel overwhelmed by the number of techniques and approaches available in this domain. The final section on choosing software to help with your qualitative analysis is also very helpful, although now slightly out of date as the book was published into 1994. The main driver of the book is that the authors want you to understand qualitative data and the key differences between this approach and more widely used statistical approaches. And then they expect you to apply this knowledge in an idiosyncratic way to solve YOUR specific problem! One tip: if your supervisor/boss is not from a qualitative background and you are doing qualitative analysis, this book gives you plenty of important sounding names for the techniques to blind your supervisor with science!!!

An invaluable sourcebook for PhD students

Customer Rating:

It's an invaluable book for PhD students who feel overwhelmed with the unstructured nature of qualitative data and want to get a genuine understanding of how to draw valid meaning from qualitative data. Admitting that the most central difficulty in the use of qualitative data is that methods of analysis are not well formulated; this book provides each method of qualitative data analysis in detail by giving specific illustrations and in a clearly understandable manner by using an accessible language. As its name implies, it is a real sourcebook that offers a wide range of material to explore for new as well as experienced researchers!