README FIRST for a User's Guide to Qualitative Methods

Lyn Richards (B.A. Hon., political science; M.A., sociology) is a qualitative research writer and consultant and Adjunct Professor in the Graduate School of Business at RMIT University in Melbourne. As a family sociologist, she published four books and many papers on Australian families and women’s roles. As a methodologist, she taught graduate and undergraduate qualitative research at La Trobe University and went on to write for and teach the teachers. Her most recent book is Handling Qualitative Data, Second Edition (SAGE, 2009). In university research with Tom Richards, she developed the NUD*IST software and founded QSR International, Melbourne. In interaction with the researchers using the software, and later development teams at QSR, she worked on the design of the subsequent versions (to N6) and then NVivo, as a principal member of the QSR software-development teams and author of the software’s documentation. She was an invited speaker at all of the conferences in the first decade of qualitative computing and a leading teacher and trainer internationally in qualitative computing and the handling of qualitative data. Richards has taught qualitative methods and qualitative software to some 4,000 researchers in 15 countries, and learned from them all.

Janice M. Morse, PhD (Nurs), PhD (Anthro), FAAN is a professor and Presidential Endowed Chair at the University of Utah College of Nursing, and Professor Emeritus, University of Alberta, Canada., from 1991-1996, she also held a position as professor at The Pennsylvania State University. From 1997-2007, she was the founding Director and Scientific Director of the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology, University of Alberta, founding editor for the International Journal of Qualitative Methods, and Editor of the Qual Press monograph series. She remains the founding editor for Qualitative Health Research, (now in Volume 2, Sage1), is currently editor for the monograph series Developing Qualitative Inquiry, and The Essentials of Qualitative Inquiry (Left Coast Press). Her research programs are in the areas of suffering and comforting, preventing patient falls, and developing qualitative methods. In 2011, she was awarded the Lifetime Achievement in Qualitative Inquiry from the International Center for Qualitative Inquiry, was an inaugural inductee into the Sigma Theta Tau International Nurse Researcher Hall of Fame (2010), the 5th recipient of the Episteme Award (also Sigma Theta Tau). She received awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Newcastle (Australia) and Athabasca University (Canada). She is the author of 460 articles and chapters and 19 books on qualitative research methods, suffering, comforting and patient falls.