Designing Qualitative Research

Catherine Marshall is Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Formerly a teacher in Rhode Island, her studies and career moves include doctoral studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles, and faculty positions at the University of Pennsylvania and Vanderbilt University before moving in 1991 to Chapel Hill. Her teaching and research interests include the use an interdisciplinary approach to analyze school cultures, state policy systems, and the professional development of adults working in organizations. She has published extensively about the politics of education, qualitative methodology, and women's access to careers as well as about the socialization, language, and values in educational leadership. She is the author of Reframing Educational Politics for Social Justice (Allyn & Bacon, 2004); Leadership for Social Justice: Making Revolutions in Education, Culture and Education Policy in the American States (Allyn & Bacon, 2005); and Designing Qualitative Research, Fifth Edition (SAGE, 2010), as well as a number of other books and numerous journal articles.

Gretchen B. Rossman is Professor of International Education at the Center for International Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received her PhD in education from the University of Pennsylvania with a specialization in higher education administration. She has served as a visiting professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. Prior to coming to the University of Massachusetts, she was Senior Research Associate at Research for Better Schools in Philadelphia. With an international reputation as a qualitative methodologist, she has expertise in qualitative research design and methods, mixed- methods monitoring and evaluation, and inquiry in education. Over the past 30+ years, she has coauthored numerous books, two of which are editions of major qualitative research texts (this fourth edition of Learning in the Field, with Sharon Rallis, and Designing Qualitative Research, 6th edition, with Catherine Marshall—both widely used guides to qualitative inquiry). She has authored or coauthored more than 45 articles, book chapters, and technical reports focused on methodological issues in qualitative research syntheses, validity in qualitative research, mixed-methods evaluation practice, and ethical research practice, as well as the analysis and evaluation of educational reform initiatives both in the United States and internationally.

Professor Rossman has served as principal investigator (PI) or co-PI on several international projects in such countries as Azerbaijan, India, Malawi, Palestine, Senegal, Tanzania, and the Gambia, as well as external evaluator on several domestic projects, including a Department of Education–funded reform initiative, a National Science Foundation–funded middle-grades science initiative, and a number of projects implementing more inclusive practices for students with disabilities. She regularly presents papers at the annual meetings of the American Educational Research Association and the Comparative and International Education Society.