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Marshall, Catherine, and Gretchen B. Rossman, Designing Qualitative Research, Sixth Edition. Sage. 2016, 323 pp. $62.40 paper (9781452271002)
Designing Qualitative Research is meant for social science students training in qualitative inquiry and for professors who keep textbooks handy to check trends. The main purpose of this text is to elaborate on the steps involved in qualitative inquiry including ethics proposals, research design, data analysis, and exposition. The authors C. Marshall and G. Rossman indicate that the field of qualitative inquiry has undergone "seismic shifts" (pg. xvii) since the first edition of Designing Qualitative Research was published, and that this version of the text is updated accordingly.
In the first few chapters, Marshall and Rossman discuss how to get started with qualitative research. They argue that before any study commences the researcher should test both the feasibility and significance of the proposed research. Marshall and Rossman suggest researchers need to be trained in theory and methods but should also be aware of criteria for quality (or value, or success) in qualitative research. Next, the authors summarize genres of qualitative research, which they divide into major and minor genres. The major genres include ethnography, phenomenology, case studies, and grounded theory. The major genres refer to longstanding frameworks for inquiry, whereas the minor genres in this categorization tend to be newer and...