There are a number of excellent introductory textbooks available on qualitativeresearch, so the decision to produce yet another one perhaps needs justifying.We have written this one in response to frequent requests from our students,who are predominantly postgraduates with considerable professional experience but little prior knowledge of the social sciences. They come from almostall countries in the world, and want an introduction to qualitative methods thatis sensitive to the practicalities of doing sound research on health topics in awide variety of settings. Although the principles of research design and conductmay be the same wherever it is happening, and whatever the topic studied,clearly the practice is not. First, the context of health research may be ratherdifferent from that of general social research. It is increasingly undertakenwithin multi-disciplinary teams, in which the legitimacy of using qualitativemethodologies is still challenged. It is undertaken in institutional contexts(medical schools, health authorities, hospitals) in which the assumed modelof research may be clinical, rather than social. Although none of this has anyimpact on the principles of ‘doing good research’, it does demand a particularrange of skills from the researcher, including the ability to explain those principles to a wide range of collaborators and potential users, and an understandingof why the most common conflicts over issues such as research design mayoccur. Second, most of the social research texts on the market assume aWestern setting, and it may be difficult for a reader to grasp the principles iftheir initial reaction is ‘But that wouldn’t work in my country!’ The firstincentive for producing this text was, then, to provide an introduction toqualitative methods that used examples of health research from a number ofdifferent settings, so that we can demonstrate how key methodological issuesmay have different implications in different contexts. We have been aided inthis task by colleagues from the London School of Hygiene and TropicalMedicine who work across the world, and we have used examples fromtheir research liberally to illustrate key points.Having taught methodology courses to students from a range of low-,middle- and high-income countries, we have realized that there is a hugeamount to learn from reflecting on the differences and similarities betweenwhat is possible and productive in diverse contexts. Being forced to reflect on,for instance, different assumptions made about research interviews can aid anawareness of the cultural specificity of the interview format in any setting –something we can easily forget if all our interviewees share similar culturalbackgrounds to ourselves. Thinking through how the methodological aimsmay be shaped by practical constraints can be a very useful way of clarifyingexactly what our aims are in using particular designs, or particular methods ofcollecting data. Confronting examples from work in different settings helps allof us challenge our assumptions about what we are trying to do in conductingqualitative research of and for health.A second incentive for writing this book was to bridge a gap that is sometimes apparent between policy-orientated field guides that aim to provide‘toolboxes’ for novice researchers and theoretical introductions to socialresearch that may appear to have little relevance to researchers working inapplied areas. A key argument of this book is that good-quality applied qualitative work has to be theoretically informed: doing policy-orientated studies isno excuse for poor design, or inadequate attention to methodology. But it isnot always obvious how this is to be done, particularly if faced with theconstraints of short-term funding or inadequate training in social science methods. We hope this book will help more practically minded researchers to seethe value of attending to theoretical issues, both for producing more usefulfindings and for unpacking some of the debates they will inevitably have aboutthe validity, generalizability and implications of their findings.Following from this, a third aim of this book is to explore the contributionof qualitative methods to understanding health and health behaviour. Althoughthere is now largely an acceptance of the value of qualitative methods in publichealth research, many of our students and colleagues still report having to‘justify’ their use to collaborators who are sceptical or simply poorly informed.Qualitative researchers still face questions about the validity and generalizabilityof their methods, and lack of understanding of what qualitative research aims todo. Throughout this book we have suggested how this kind of scepticismcan be met – not to convince our readers, who are presumably already convinced, but to help in potential discussions with colleagues from other researchtraditions.This book is intended primarily, then, for public health, primary care, healthpromotion and nursing practitioners and managers, in both developed anddeveloping countries, with little previous experience of social science theory,who need to commission, use or conduct qualitative research. The aims are tointroduce readers to some of the debates in qualitative methodology, todemonstrate the uses of qualitative designs and methods of data generationin a wide range of health research projects, and to suggest ways of improvingtheir own research practice. We also hope it will be a useful text for socialresearch students, in introducing some of the particular methodological possibilities and challenges of researching health.The structure of the book is straightforward. The chapters in Part 1 deal withmethodological principles, research designs and ethics. They introduce some ofthe key terms used in methodology, and some of the underlying principles ofqualitative approaches. Those in Part 2 discuss four common strategies forxiv P R E F A C Eproducing or collecting qualitative data: in-depth interviews, group interviews,observation and documentary research. These chapters provide overviews ofthese methods of generating data and suggestions for improving research practice. The final chapter in this section is an introduction to some common waysof analysing qualitative data. Part 3 highlights the practical issues raised by‘doing’ qualitative health research, with chapters on working in multi-disciplinary settings and on writing and reading qualitative work. Throughout thebook we have drawn on examples of social research on health from a numberof settings. Some of these are extended case studies, which are summaries ofpublished research. It would be helpful to look at the sources of these whereverpossible, as a good way of learning about methods is to read how others haveapproached questions of design and conduct. Even better as a learning tool isdoing research, and there are suggestions for exercises to develop your own skillsat the end of each chapter.Finally, we should like to acknowledge the input of our past and currentcolleagues and students from the London School of Hygiene and TropicalMedicine, whose experiences, both published and unpublished, have beendrawn on widely in writing this book. We are particularly grateful to: thestudents who have taken Qualitative Methodologies over the last few years,whose lively discussions and comments have contributed to many of the ideashere (often in ways they may not approve of!); Helen Marshall, for commentson several chapters; Simon Lewin and Gillian Hundt, whose research experiences have been drawn on in a number of chapters; Geraldine Barrett, for hercontributions to Chapter 8; and Simon Carter, for contributions to Chapter 10.Judith Green and Nicki Thorogood