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Qualitative Marketing Research David Carson , Audrey Gilmore , Chad Perry and Kjell Gronhaug 2001 239 p. Sage London ISBN: 0 7619 6365 0
Introduction
Brower et al. (2000) wrote that Sage Publishers offers over 140 books on qualitative research (p. 365). This particular book "Qualitative Marketing Research " is very useful to all graduate-level marketing students who are preparing dissertations or research projects (Carson, et al. , 2001). The four authors write in a single voice and seem to agree on ontological and epistemological approaches to qualitative research in Marketing. The book is divided into three parts.
Part I
Part one is titled Social Science Research and Marketing. In this section, the authors start by defining the philosophy of research and marketing. They debate the issue whether Marketing is an art or a science from the academic, business or practitioner point of view. While academics may view marketing as a scientific discipline, practitioners view marketing as an activity where requiring more art than science. They finally propose that a blend of the positivism and interpretivism approaches could be taken to perform marketing research. They presented a useful table (I.I, p. 6) of broad definitions and explanations of ontology, epistemology and methodology on the two approaches (positivism and interpretivism).
In Chapter 2 of Part I, the authors defined the scope of research in Marketing, as it may pertain to consumers or have a management focus. Chapter 3 discusses the design of a...