ABSTRACT
Qualitative research is particularly suited to understanding human behaviour within the social, cultural and local context. This chapter discusses how to conduct qualitative research, how to collect data, how to analyse it and how it can be presented. The idea of qualitative research is based on a simplistic binary opposition between the terms 'quantity' and 'quality', and 'quantify' and 'qualify'. In contrast, qualitative research seeks to preserve the richness and complexity of daily life in its interpretations and presentation. Qualitative research is particularly suited to exploring and explaining the congruence and incongruence between what people say they do and what people are seen to do. Observation in qualitative research practice usually differs from observation in other approaches like time and motion studies which are generally used to provide aggregated, numerical results. There are clear challenges in applying a traditionalist sense of ethnography to studies of workplaces and organisations. Technology is inseparable from human designers, implementers and users.
