Qualitative Methodologies for Geographers Issues and Debates

by Limb, Melanie; Dwyer, Claire

• ISBN13: 9780340742266
• ISBN10: 0340742267
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-03-14
• Publisher: Hodder Education Publishers

Summary

This book is a critical introduction to qualitative methodologies for those preparing to undertake their own qualitative research, or who need to better understand the processes to evaluate and interpret the geographic research of others. Its aim is to demystify the process of using qualitative methodologies through the discussion and illustration of research in practice. Each chapter presents an insight into the author's own experiences of using qualitative research across a number of projects, and reflects on the dilemmas, thought-processes, and questions involved. The reader is invited to engage in the issues and debates thrown up by these examples and, in so doing, to deepen their understanding of the research processes that may be applied to their own projects.

Table of Contents

List of figures	viii
List of boxes	ix
Notes on contributors	x
Acknowledgements	xv
Introduction: doing qualitative research in geography	1	(22)
Claire Dwyer
Melanie Limb
PART 1 Research design
Doing qualitative research: from interpretation to action	23	(18)
Susan Smith
At the drawing board: developing a research design	41	(14)
Gill Valentine
Negotiating the personal and the political in critical qualitative research	55	(18)
Audrey Kobayashi
PART 2 Interviewing
Shared lives: interviewing couples, playing with their children	73	(14)
Stuart Aitken
Cross-cultural research: issues of power, positionality and `race'	87	(14)
Tracey Skelton
`Insiders' and/or `outsiders': positionality, theory and praxis	101	(20)
Robina Mohammad
PART 3 Group discussions
The focus-group experience	121	(15)
Tracey Bedford
Jacquelin Burgess
Working with groups	136	(17)
James Kneale
PART 4 Participant observation and ethnography
Fieldwork in the trenches: participant observation in a conflict area	153	(12)
Lorraine Dowler
Multiple methods and research relations with children in rural Bolivia	165	(16)
Samantha Punch
Negotiating different ethnographic contexts and building geographical knowledges: empirical examples from mental-health research	181	(18)
Hester Parr
PART 5 Interpretative strategies
Making sense of qualitative data	199	(16)
Peter Jackson
Field work: making sense of group interviews	215	(19)
Mike Crang
Interpretation, representation, positionality: issues in field research in human geography	234	(17)
David Ley
Alison Mountz
PART 6 Writing
Writing conversation	251	(13)
Katy Bennett
Pam Shurmer-Smith
From where I write: the place of positionality in qualitative writing	264	(15)
Ruth Butler
PART 7 Vignettes
Schooling and striving for success: an investigation into the aspirations of girls attending high school in rural south India	279	(3)
Katharine Moss
Being Asian, being British and being into black music: the influence of black music on hybrid identities of young South Asian women in London	282	(3)
Sunita Ram
Househusbands: the socio-spatial construction of male gender identity	285	(3)
Annabelle Aish
Representations of `race' in Goodness Gracious Me: comparing British South Asian and white British responses to the programme	288	(3)
Sarah Corke
The retail workplace geography of gender, space and power dynamics: a case study of a camping business in south-east England	291	(4)
Philippa Capps
Index	295