Qualitative methods have become increasingly popular among researchers in the professions: social work, nursing, education, business, computer science, and occupational therapy. And while many comprehensive textbooks (in sociology, anthropology and psychology) describe the standard techniques and philosophical assumptions, when the audience is broadened to include practitioners, it is often assumed that practitioners are the consumers of research, not the producers. This book uses qualitative methods to engage practitioners as knowledge producers. In particular, theory-to-practice gaps are des ... More

Qualitative methods have become increasingly popular among researchers in the professions: social work, nursing, education, business, computer science, and occupational therapy. And while many comprehensive textbooks (in sociology, anthropology and psychology) describe the standard techniques and philosophical assumptions, when the audience is broadened to include practitioners, it is often assumed that practitioners are the consumers of research, not the producers. This book uses qualitative methods to engage practitioners as knowledge producers. In particular, theory-to-practice gaps are described as indispensable conditions for conducting research that matters in worlds of practice. Practitioners are encouraged to lead research by conducting engaged scholarship, which promotes collaboration between practitioners and researchers to address practice-related problems in real world settings. Whereas reductionist methods assume that practice unfolds in closed systems, where variables can be manipulated and controlled or used to predict, the argument developed in this work, using critical realist philosophy, supports the idea that practice takes place in complex open systems. This, in turn, requires a specific practice-to-research vocabulary: brute and institutional facts, contingency and necessity, essentialism, and the phenomenological practice gap. Engaged scholarship and critical realist assumptions are applied to three case studies that combine research questions with data collection techniques and analytic strategies. Thematic, grounded theory, and narrative research techniques are illustrated, including original quick-start instructions for using ATLAS.ti computer software. Institutional ethnography is described, and a case study is used to illustrate the influence of policy implementation on clinical practice.