Introduction to the Companion Site

Welcome to the resources pages for the third edition of README FIRST for a User's Guide to Qualitative Methods. These pages, authored by Lyn Richards, supplement the book’s advice for researchers approaching qualitative research for the first time. In the book, the emphasis is on how to achieve the fit of question, design, data, theory and ways of handling data during analysis in a qualitative project. These pages address the related task of fitting your project to appropriate software tools. For almost all qualitative projects now, specialised software tools are important in achieving good research. So choosing appropriate software, and using it well, is critical to success.

The following materials are available on this site:

General Resources

Meeting Software
If you are starting from little knowledge of qualitative computing, click here for details of advice available on the resource pages for the present author’s companion book, Handling Qualitative Data.

The Learner's Experience
In the decades since the advent of specialist software for qualitative research, there has been little assessment of the challenges of learning it, and the better and worse ways of approaching it. Those of us who taught researchers over these years learned a lot about the factors that assist success and failure in learning software and using it skilfully. But the experience of the teachers has rarely been shared. For this section, three software trainers who have trained in many different products have been asked to write about what they learned.

Chapter Resources

Approaches, advances, alerts
Throughout README First, there are sections on software relevant to a current chapter. These provide segments of advice on what software can do in that context, on the ways it can strengthen the researcher’s work, and importantly on challenges and risks in using software. This section brings together those segments of advice so they can be read as one document.

Authors: Lyn Richards and Janice M. Morse

Pub Date: April 2012

Pages: 336

Learn more about this book