Bücher von Nigel G. Fielding

In the light of recent theoretical and methodological advances Linking Data describes the ways in which substantive problems and research issues can be tackled effectively through the inter-relationship of quantitative and qualitative data. They also include a discussion of multi-method research which is critical of the naive assumption that using several different methods necessarily ensures the validity of research findings.

Social scientists have always recognised a divergence between approaches which emphasise the constraining power of social structure and those which interpret society through the cumulative effects of actions of individuals. In recent years there has been renewed interest in the latter through the micro-sociology of everyday life. Social scientists are now taking stock of the implications of micro-sociological research for the analysis of structure and the macro-level theory of society. In Actions and Structure the value of micro-sociological research for the analysis of social order is assessed. Individual chapters evaluate new research approaches from discourse and conversational analysis, mathematical, interactionist and phenomenological sociologies and network analysis. Throughout the authors assess how these approaches contribute to current debates around theoretical formulations of organization, structure and power.

The use of computers in qualitative research has redefined the way social researchers handle qualitative data. Two leading researchers in the field have written this lucid text on the principal approaches in qualitative research and show how the leading computer programs are used in computer-assisted qualitative data analysis (CAQDAS).