Culture is increasingly important to American social science, but in what way? This book addresses the core issues of the sociology of culture-questions about the social role of meaning, along with those about the methods sociologists use to study culture and society-in a manner that makes clear their relevance to sociology as a whole. Part I consists of essays by leading cultural sociologists on how the turn to culture has changed the sociological study of organizations, economic action, and television, and concludes with Georgina Born's methodological statement on the sociology of art and cultural production. Part II contains a highly original, and at times heated, debate between Richard Biernacki and John H. Evans on the appropriateness of abstract and quantifiable coding schemes for the sociological study of culture. Ranging from the philosophy of science to the concrete, practical problems of interpreting masses of cultural data, the debate raises the controversy over the interpretation of culture and the explanation of social action to a new level of sophistication.

本书以一种独特的方式向读者介绍、展现并对比了五种核心质性研究和资料分析的方法：扎根理论、现象学心理学、叙事研究、话语分析和直觉探询。
五种研究方法的领军学者们共同分析了一个案例，案例主角“特蕾莎”曾是一名才华横溢的歌唱者，得了甲状腺癌，失去了嗓音，被迫改变了职业轨迹。作者们生动细致地展示了不同研究方法的资料分析过程；它们的相似性与差异性；它们独特的研究目的、优势与魅力。每位研究者独特的角色、风格和主体性也得到了淋漓尽致的展现。
本书充分展现了质性研究的科学与伦理的复杂性。其打破了研究者与研究参与者之间的壁垒和界限，邀请“特蕾莎”走到前台，成为第六位作者。她对五位学者的案例分析做出书面回应，从而探讨了研究参与者介入质性研究所带来的伦理挑战与独特启发。
本书是质性研究里程碑式的著作，适合心理学与社会科学领域的学生和研究者使用。

《质性研究技能三十项》是“格致方法·社会科学研究方法译丛”之一。本书充分涵盖了进行质性研究的一般原则。作者介绍了自己在开展质性研究时所使用的三十项必备技能，这些技能是研究新手在开始质性研究时所应掌握的核心技能。作者在每一章中详细阐述了一种技能，如，怎样对录音文本或研究对象绘制的图片等质性材料进行编码，怎样设计中心问题或分析质性访谈资料等，从而将一些实用性的“如何操作”的建议提供给了读者。

All researchers want to produce interesting and influential theories. A key step in all theory development is formulating innovative research questions that will result in interesting and significant research.
Traditional textbooks on research methods tend to ignore, or gloss over, actual ways of constructing research questions. In this text, Alvesson and Sandberg develop a problematization methodology for identifying and challenging the assumptions underlying existing theories and for generating research questions that can lead to more interesting and influential theories, using examples from across the social sciences. Established methods of generating research questions in the social sciences tend to focus on 'gap-spotting', which means that existing literature remains largely unchallenged. The authors show the dangers of conventional approaches, providing detailed ideas for how one can work through such problems and formulate novel research questions that challenge existing theories and produce more imaginative empirical studies.
Constructing Research Questions is essential reading for any researcher looking to formulate research questions that are interesting and novel.

【编辑推荐】
★ 芝加哥社会学大师数十年研究方法的精粹、社会学科经典文献的种草机
★ 从社会学科到人文学科、从本科生到博士生都用得上的选题宝典
★ 就连自然学科的读者读了也希望本学科拥有同类书！（遗憾的是他们也许没有）
★ 亲身操练其中方法，迎来灵光乍现、恍然大悟的时刻
【内容简介】
人文社科领域已经存在大量优秀的研究，对于各阶段学生甚至各领域的学者来说，低垂的果实似乎已经被摘剩下不多，避开重复、做出有趣的研究日益艰难，读完大量文献我们反倒脑袋空空，提笔只感觉没什么值得写的。
诚然，创造力无法被传授，但要获取点子确有门道，安德鲁·阿伯特在本书中结合不 同的研究方法，以社会科学的经典文献为例，演示如何通过启发法找到值得一说的观点——很多时候，这是通往优秀研究最重要的部分。
本书既是一流学者集数十年功力总结的学术探索指津，能够廓清大量关于做研究的误解，辨认出好的研究长什么样、应该怎么做；于圈外读者而言它也是一份阅读图鉴，能够助你辨认出那些滥竽充数、应略读或跳过的作品。

Edited by Canadian sociologist William K. Carroll, this thought-provoking volume is designed for research methods courses in sociology and social sciences. Critical Strategies for Social Research explores ways in which several key research strategies bring an emancipatory dimension to social analysis. The new approaches recognize that social analysis is a form of knowledge production that takes place in a human-constructed world marked by injustice and persistent inequality.

Carroll considers five influential and productive strategies of inquiry: Dialectical Social Analysis Institutional Ethnography Participatory Action Research Critical Discourse Analysis Social Inquiry as Communicative Reason

Ho addresses two fundamental theoretical questions about how best to practice ethnographic inquiries to obtain qualitative, experience-near, and shareable accounts of human living. The first question is regarding the epistemology of ethnography. Ho posits that writing is epistemologically prior to the researcher’s fieldwork experience in the production of ethnographic knowledge. This stance is developed using the theories of hermeneutics put forward by Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer who both consider that once a text is produced, its meaning is dissociated from the intention of the author. The second question is: what is the putative object that the ethnographer writes about? Ho argues that "lived experience" (Erlebnis) offers such an ethnographic object. Since the lived experience that an ethnographer experiences during fieldwork cannot be studied directly, further theorizations of lived experience are necessary. Ho underscores both the non-discursivity and transcendence of lived experience in the lifeworld, and the way power is clandestinely imbued in everyday life in shaping subjectivity and practice. This theorization brings together Alfred Schutz’s lifeworld theory and Michel Foucault’s power/knowledge nexus. The result is a general theory of experience that is pertinent for ethnographic inquiries. By addressing these two fundamental questions and offering novel angles from which to answer them, this book offers refreshed epistemological guidelines for conducting ethnographic research for scientific reasoning. More importantly, this book also provides a crucial knowledge base for comprehending the current epistemological debates inherent in the production of ethnographic knowledge and furthering discussions in the field.