Methods textbooks generally offer prescriptive advice on how to perform certain techniques, how to develop specific strategies, how to analyze your results. But, as all experienced ethnographers know, this fine-sounding advice rarely provides ample guidance in dealing with real people in real field settings. That is where this casebook differs. Selecting many key methods regularly used by anthropologists - participant observation, consensus analysis, simple surveys, scaling, freelisting an...

The fully updated Second Edition presents systematic methods for analyzing qualitative data with clear and easy-to-understand steps. The first half is an overview of the basics, from choosing a topic to collecting data, and coding to finding themes, while the second half covers different methods of analysis, including grounded theory, content analysis, analytic induction, semantic network analysis, ethnographic decision modeling, and more. Real examples drawn from social s...