To the Instructor

This introductory research text is intended as a guide for your students who are most likely to be consumers, but not necessarily producers, of qualitative research. Although the book might serve as a primer for fledgling researchers, the overarching goal is to support your efforts in teaching students to become more intelligent readers and interpreters of this kind of research conducted by others.

The specific audiences are students in upper-level undergraduate and beginning graduate research courses who are not likely to pursue additional research course work on their own. Thus no prior experience or prerequisite course work would be required before using this text, although an introductory quantitative and qualitative survey course would be a useful foundation.

The book is structured to support your instructional endeavors in encouraging students to recognize important distinctions between research-based work and alternative sources of knowledge, to be able to understand the language and procedures normally encountered in different types of qualitative research studies, and to make practical sense of such studies in translating findings for use in everyday practice. Our purposes emphasized in this text include the following:

• Using, where possible, nontechnical language to explain research ideas
• Providing practical explanations of research approaches and the kinds of questions each answers
• Presenting clear-cut descriptions of most qualitative approaches used in education and the social sciences
• Making distinctions among a wide array of research approaches
• Offering explanations for necessary technical terms needed to understand how research is reported
• Examining forms and criteria for planning and conducting research
• Showing how each approach can be critically evaluated and interpreted from a practitioner's perspective
• Identifying actual research studies to allow students to practice critical analysis

The book is organized for a college course format in which one to two chapters may be assigned each week. And, because the chapters are of a stand-alone quality, you may use the sequence offered or may select a sequence that suits your unique instructional plans. Additional instructional features of the text are

• Chapters specifically relevant to qualitative research on ethics, the role of grounded theory, and data collection methods and tools
• A writing style that makes ideas accessible to students new to the field
• A diverse and balanced perspective of a broad spectrum of qualitative research methodologies ranging from discipline-based and interdisciplinary to emancipatory approaches
• An ending chapter on democratizing qualitative research designs
• Challenging questions distributed throughout each chapter to aid in instructional planning
• Key research ideas, concepts, and terms identified in each chapter
• An annotated set of relevant readings and an array of journals, organizations, and Web sites as sources for assignments and class discussions at the end of each chapter
• Expert authors for each chapter