An Invitation to Qualitative Fieldwork

This is a great book to use when teaching qualitative research methods. The approaches are clear and novel, mixing experience with scholarship, science, and humor. Students will love this book and faculty will enjoy teaching from it.

-Bryan L. Sykes, Criminology, Law & Society, University of California-Irvine

Written in an accessible style, this text introduces students to the nuts-and-bolts of designing projects and collecting original data and the broader issues that have shaped—and continue to shape— qualitative research. The authors challenge new researchers to consider how different groups (the populations being studied, researchers themselves, and the larger intended audiences) are invested in and might interpret their research. This text is a great new addition to the qualitative methods instructor’s bookshelf.

-Heather Jacobson, Sociology, The University of Texas at Arlington

An Invitation to Qualitative Fieldwork: A Multilogical Approach is a fresh and lively approach to teaching qualitative methods. It will appeal to both neophyte undergraduate and novice graduate students. Bell and Orne’s "They, You, We" framework offers students a way to understand the various positions which the ethnographer must occupy in order to grasp her own analytic perspective, the subject’s experience of reality, and the reader’s reception of the final ethnographic report. Their "cooking book" approach provides vivid, utilitarian exercises that will help students see themselves in the field. The reader is not taught how to cook the research but rather how "cooking" the experience of the field on one’s own terms is the best way to craft a unique story about the field experience. Bell and Orne tackle the tricky problem of how to engage students’ excitement and imagination in qualitative research without making them feel intellectually overwhelmed or afraid of going into the field. The chapters are helpfully short and presented with a clarifying narrative punch and focus which will appeal to readers grappling with what can feel like the impossible miasma of issues facing the qualitative researcher and writer.

-Christian J. Churchill, Sociology, St. Thomas Aquinas College