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I’m just starting the third year of my PhD in sociology, and in that time I’ve read more than a few books on doing qualitative research. I’ve settled on four that I regularly return to:
Today I’m looking at Rubin’s Rocking qualitative social science. This is the book to start with if you need an overview of the process of qualitative research, or just feeling lost. Rubin’s key point is that qualitative research can be rigorous without being rigid. To reinforce this view, Rubin uses the metaphor of rock climbing: while there are wrong ways of rock climbing, there are plenty of right ways too. According to Rubin, too many books and articles on qualitative research present a single right way to do things, even though that’s not what many researchers do in practice.
Rocking qualitative social science is organised by the components of a typical qualitative research project. The first two chapters introduce the book and qualitative research, while chapters 3 and 4 cover identifying your research question and theoretical angle. Chapters 5 to 7 cover research design, including case section and sampling. Chapters 8 and 9 cover data collection and analysis. The final two chapters cover making causal claims and dealing with criticisms of qualitative research — topics that aren’t typically covered in qualitative research books.
I particularly liked the chapters on identifying your research question and theoretical angle. Rubin criticises overly rigid approaches to research questions that require them to have independent and dependent variables. Instead, according to Rubin, you can start with a research interest and and just frame it as a question. Rubin helpfully breaks down research questions as having two components:
You can start with either a topic or a theoretical approach, but you need to end up with both. So if you start with theoretical ‘stuff’, you then need to pick a topic or setting in which you can examine that theoretical ‘stuff’. This is apparently the standard way of doing research, and it explains why I always found the typical approach to formulating research questions so confusing, because it’s not the way I work. Instead, my research started with an interest in a particular topic. Following Rubin’s guidance, with this approach you start with this topic and then find a relevant theoretical concept or debate to go with that topic. (There’s also a third approach where you pick a topic + theoretical combo that always go together in your field.) But how do you know what the theoretical ‘stuff’ is? Rubin gives concrete guidance on identifying this, explaining how you can reframe your empirical puzzle (your topic) in theoretical language.
I also appreciated the chapters on data collection and analysis. Rather than providing advice on different research methods (interviews, participant observation, document analysis, action research etc), Rubin generalises, arguing that most qualitative research can follow what she terms the ‘fieldwork model of data collection’, in which you are reflexive and generate fieldnotes. Similarly, she argues that most qualitative research can be analysed using content analysis and analytic memos. This is one chapter were I would have liked a bit more information: Rubin describes generating and applying codes to your observations through content analysis, and then writing analytic memos (which are about your insights arising from your data), but doesn’t detail how you get from your observations to your insights. But overall, this is an excellent introductory book that provides a number of ways to conduct rigorous qualitative research.
