Packed with practical advice and research quick tips, this book is the perfect companion to your health research project. It not only explains the theory of qualitative health research so you can interpret the studies of others, but also showcases how to approach, start, maintain, and disseminate your own research.
It will help you:
- Understand the role of the researcher
- Develop an effective research proposal
- Seek ethical approval
- Conduct interviews, observational studies, mixed methods, and web-based designs
- Use secondary and digital sources
- Code, manage, and analyse data
- Write up your results
Whether you are studying public health, sports medicine, occupational therapy, nursing, midwifery, or another health discipline, the authors will be your surrogate supervisors and guide you through evaluating or undertaking any type of health research.
Judith Green is Professor of Sociology of Health at King's College London.
Nicki Thorogood is Programme Director, DrPH, at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
Judith Green has degrees in anthropology and sociology, and a PhD in the sociology of health. She has taught research methods to a wide range of students over the last 30 years, including undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral students and health professionals from nursing, medicine, public health and sociology. She is currently Professor of Sociology at the University of Exeter, and Honorary Professor, in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney. She has held posts at the King’s College London, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and London South Bank University. Judith has broad substantive interests in the sociology of health and health services, and has researched and published on primary care, professional identity, accidental injury, public understanding of risk and the relationships between transport and well-being. She is currently co-editor of the Journal of Critical Public Health. Other publications include Risk and misfortune: The social construction of accidents (1997, Taylor & Francis); Critical perspectives in public health, co-edited with Ronald Labonté (2008, Routledge) and Analysing health policy: A sociological approach (1998, Longman), also co-authored with Nicki Thorogood.
Nicki Thorogood’s first degree was in sociology and social anthropology, and she has a PhD in the sociology of health from the University of London. She has over 30 years’ experience of teaching undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral students and health professionals from nursing, medicine, public health and sociology She is currently Programme Director for the DrPH (Doctorate in Public Health) at LSHTM as well as supervising several research degree students. Before coming to LSHTM (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) in 1999 she held posts at Middlesex University and at Guy’s, King’s and Thomas’s School of Medicine and Dentistry (GKT).
Her research interests are primarily in qualitative research into aspects of ‘identity’, e.g. ethnicity, gender, disability and sexuality and in the sociology of the body. She is also interested in the intersection of mental health with public health and health promotion. She is Series Editor, with Rosalind Plowman, of the Understanding Public Health series of textbooks published by Open University Press.
