Transforming Qualitative Data: Description, Analysis, and Interpretation

Front Cover
SAGE, 1994 M02 18 - 433 pages
Publisher's description: After the glamour of working in the field is over, you now face the daunting challenge of transforming your field notes and interview tapes into a completed study. But where do you start? In Transforming Qualitative Data, Harry F. Wolcott guides you through the process of completing your research study. Beginning with an introductory chapter that presents his views on ethnography, he explores the transformation process by breaking it down into three related activities: description, analysis, and interpretation. To illustrate each point, he critically examines his own work, using nine of his previous studies as illustrations. Then he shows you how to learn--and to teach--qualitative research by applying the three principles outlined in the volume. Written with the usual wit and brilliance shown in Wolcott's work, Transforming Qualitative Data is a major statement on doing research by one of the master ethnographers of our time.
 

Contents

Something Old Something
1
Emphasis on Description
55
9
91
Preface
103
Notes From a Field Study
115
Confessions of a Trained Observer
157
Emphasis on Analysis
173
Selection
197
The Teacher as an Enemy
261
A Kwakiutl Village
287
Notes on a Working Paper
311
On Seeking and Rejecting
337
Teaching and Learning Qualitative Inquiry
375
Teaching Qualitative Inquiry
381
Learning Qualitative Inquiry
397
Some Power of Reasoning Much Aided
411

Cultural Alternatives
222
Emphasis on Interpretation
255

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About the author (1994)

Harry F. Wolcott (Ph.D. Stanford) taught at the University of Oregon, serving on both the faculties of education and anthropology. He authored several ethnographic texts that included his experiences among the Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia and with the African Beer Gardens of Bulawayo, Rhodesia, as well on ethnographic method and on writing itself, with a focus on qualitative research. His publications included: Transforming Qualitative Data (SAGE 1994); Art of Fieldwork (2nd ed., Altamira Press 2005); Ethnography: A Way of Seeing (2nd ed., Altamira Press 2008); Writing Up Qualitative Research (3rd ed., SAGE 2009); Sneaky Kid and Its Aftermath: Ethics and Intimacy in Fieldwork (Altamira 2002), and Ethnography Lessons: A Primer (Left Coast Press, 2010).

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