I’ve been reading David Silerman’s Doing Qualitative Research the last few weeks. I’ve currently read most of the chapters that I find relevant at this time in my research:
- Ch. 2: What you can (and can’t) do with QR
- Ch. 3: The research experience I
- Ch. 4: The research experience II
- Ch. 5: What counts as originality
- Ch. 6: Selecting a topic
- Ch. 7: Using theories
- Ch. 8: Choosing a methodology
- Ch. 9: Selecting a case
- Ch. 10: Writing a research proposal
- Ch. 11: Beginning data analysis
- Ch. 12: Developing data analysis
- Ch. 16: Keeping a record
- Ch. 17: Relations in the field
- Ch. 18: Making good use of your supervisor
- Ch. 19: Getting feedback
- Ch. 20: The first few pages
- Ch. 21: The literature review chapter
The following chapters should be read next (when they become relevant):
- Ch. 14: Quality in qualitative research
- Ch. 15: Evaluating qualitative research
- Ch. 22: The methodology chapter
- Ch. 23: Writing your data chapters
- Ch. 24: The final chapter
- Ch. 26: Effective qualitative research
The rest of the chapters can safely be skipped just by looking at their titles.
I think it would be beneficial to revisit parts of this text at later stages in my research to check that I’m asking the right questions and taking the best approaches. All in all I found most of the advice in this book to sound very sound (even though parts of it are geared to far away from the part of social science that is interesting for general computer scientists).