This chapter reviews basic issues of theory and method in approaches to research on teaching that are alternatively called ethnographic, qualitative, participant observational, case study, symbolic interactionist, phenomenological, constructivist, or interpretive. These approaches are all slightly different, but each bears strong family resemblance to the others. The set of related approaches i...

“Qualitative GIS – isn’t that kind of an oxymoron?” This comment from a colleague with years of experience working with GIS echoes the title of an editorial from an edition of Environment and Planning dedicated to the topic (Kwan and Knigge: 2006), and voices lingering concerns about the limitations of GIS. Qualitative GIS: A Mixed Methods Approach serves as an invitation to scholars in fields ...

In this paper we consider the problem of classification of qualitative data. We present an approach to overcome several difficulties which show SAHN (sequential, agglomerative, hierarchic, nonoverlapping) clustering methods to classify qualitative data when using centroids to compute similarities between pairs of classes. The approach is based on a recently proposed class of qualitative weighte...

This paper provides a primer for qualitative research in medical education. Our aim is to equip readers with a basic understanding of qualitative research and prepare them to judge the goodness of fit between qualitative research and their own research questions. We provide an overview of the reasons for choosing a qualitative research approach and potential benefits of using these methods for ...

CASPUR allows many academic Italian institutions located in the CentreSouth of Italy to access more than 7 million of articles through a digital library platform. We analyzed the behaviour of its users by considering their “traces” stored into the web server log file. Using several Web Mining and Data Mining techniques we discovered that there is a gradual and dynamic change in the way how arti...

This article describes the process by which one study utilized qualitative methods to create items for a multi dimensional scale to measure twelve step program affiliation. The process included interviewing fourteen addicted persons while in twelve step focused treatment about specific “pros” (things they like or would miss out on by not being involved in twelve-step programs) and “cons” (thing...