Qualitative Research for the Information Professional:: A Practical Handbook

Citation

Calvert, P. (1998), "Qualitative Research for the Information Professional:: A Practical Handbook", Asian Libraries, Vol. 7 No. 6, pp. 138-140. https://doi.org/10.1108/al.1998.7.6.138.4

Not so many years ago Gorman and Clayton would never have found a publisher for their manuscript. So much has changed over the last decade, however, that they can now confidently expect their new book to be a great success. The shift in emphasis in LIS from quantitative to qualitative methods has followed that of the social sciences in general, as many researchers have discovered that an over‐dependence upon surveys and other number‐crunching techniques produced only “thin” results which never really explained the underlying problems embedded in the situations they had set out to deal with. It is the richness of the data derived from qualitative methods which makes them so suitable for many LIS purposes, such as investigating service quality or user education programmes, and other “people”‐related matters. If you ask people their opinion of a service‐related activity, it makes more sense to record the responses in their actual words rather than trying to reduce them to numerical data.

The subtitle is accurate: this really is “a practical handbook” for any information worker intending to use (or even considering the use of) qualitative research methods. The assumption is that the reader has little or no background in research, so the authors go right back to basics before working though the identification of the research problem, the literature review, and then the selection of an appropriate methodology. Different qualitative methods are explained, such as observation, interviewing, focus groups and Nominal Group Technique. It is interesting that even historical method is included, in a chapter specially written by Lyn Gorman. Practical matters such as choosing participants and locations, gaining access, the ethical details which need to be considered, then the actual collection, recording and analysis of the data are all covered in depth. As someone who has used qualitative methods in his own research, I expected to disagree with the authors on some matters, but there is so much experience and good old‐fashioned common‐sense in this book that I will not challenge any of what it says. I found the section on Nominal Group Technique so detailed and yet so fascinating that I just may use it myself when I find a suitable opportunity.

Each chapter follows much the same structure, starting with a set of focus questions to introduce the main topic. The text is supported by several figures and tables, and is interspersed with “research scenarios” which one suspects are from case studies done by the authors or their students. Each chapter then concludes with a review, some self‐evaluation questions, and suggestions for further reading. The final index and bibliography are very thorough.

Mary Lynn Rice‐Lively contributed a crucial chapter to the book. It is a case study called “Sensemaking in the Electronic Reference Centre: An Ethnographic Study”, which appears to be based on real case studies she has done in the past. Most of the other chapters point to this case study, and the reader is then asked several pertinent questions about it. It is an innovative device which has worked very well in this context, as the authors can point the reader, consistently, to one well‐developed case study as a reference rather than continually using different examples.

If I have any criticism to offer, then it is a sin of omission rather than commission. Recently I had a need to evaluate the effectiveness of a specific library service, that is, to test the effectiveness of the actual product itself. The Gorman/Clayton approach seems to concentrate on the impact such a service will have on the organisation (the people) rather than upon evaluating concrete products and services, yet there will be many instances when qualitative methods suit such evaluations because ours is, as the authors emphasise, a service industry and therefore well suited to holistic and ‘sense‐making’ methods of examining our actual products. Perhaps this will be covered in the second edition?

I highly recommended this text to LIS research students. It will also be very useful for all LIS faculty who must supervise dissertations and other research projects. It may even be appropriate as a text for a research methods course in a university LIS programme, which is perhaps what the authors intended, but I fear the price put on it by the publishers may deter students. All academic libraries should buy a copy even if they do not support LIS programmes, because the subject matter is relevant to all the social sciences.