David Silverman trained as a sociologist at the London School of Economics and the University of California, Los Angeles. He taught for 32 years at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is interested in conversation and discourse analysis and he has researched medical consultations and HIV-test counselling.

He is the author of Interpreting Qualitative Data (Seventh Edition, 2024) and A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Qualitative Research (Second Edition, 2013). He is also the editor of Qualitative Research (Sixth Edition, 2026) and the Sage series, Introducing Qualitative Methods. In recent years, he has offered short, hands-on workshops in qualitative research for research students and faculty at universities in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.

Now retired from full-time work, David aims to watch one hundred days of cricket a year. He also enjoys voluntary work in an old people's home where he sings with residents with dementia and strokes.

Part I: Setting The Scene
Chapter 1: Introducing Qualitative Research - David Silverman
Chapter 2: Addressing Social Problems through Qualitative Research - Ross Koppel and Joel Telles
Chapter 3: Ethics and qualitative research - Anne Ryen
Part II: Interviews And Focus Groups
Chapter 4: The Inside and the Outside: Finding Realities in Interviews - Jody Miller and Barry Glassner
Chapter 5: Interviewing as a form of Narrative Practice - James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium
Chapter 6: Analysing Focus Group Data - Sue Wilkinson
Part III: Ethnography
Chapter 7: Ethnographic Practices: Theory, Method, Trends - Erika Cellini and Giampietro Gobo
Chapter 8: Organizational Ethnography - Thomas Eberle and Christoph Maeder
Chapter 9: Practising Reflexivity in Ethnography - Marie Buscatto
Part IV: Texts
Chapter 10: Analysing Documents through Fieldwork - Katarina Jacobsson
Chapter 11: Documents and Documentation - Jamie Lewis and Paul Atkinson
Part V: Talk
Chapter 12: Discursive Psychology - cognition and emotion in interaction - Jonathan Potter
Chapter 13: Conversation Analysis: Practices and Methods - John Heritage
Part VI: Expanding Technologies
Chapter 14: Analysing online data - David C. Giles
Chapter 15: Using CDA on internet data - Johann W. Unger, Ruth Wodak and Majid Khosravinik
Chapter 16: Researchers and Machines: Navigating the methodologically responsible use of Artificial Intelligence Tools in Data Analysis - Christian Schmieder
Part VII: Visual Data
Chapter 17: Analysing visual data - Susan Danby and Michael Emmison
Chapter 18: Video and the Analysis of Social Interaction - Christian Heath
Part VIII: Qualitative Data Analysis
Chapter 19: Some pragmatics of qualitative data analysis - Tim Rapley
Chapter 20: Multimethod Qualitative Research - Nanna Mik-Meyer
Chapter 21: Constructing Grounded Theory Analyses - Anthony Bryant and Kathy Charmaz
Chapter 22: Narrative ethnography and Everyday Storytelling - Jaber Gubrium, James Holstein and Amir Marvasti
Chapter 23: Systematic reviews and qualitative methods - Mary Dixon-Woods
Chapter 24: Secondary analysis of qualitative data - Libby Bishop
Chapter 25: Validity in research - Anssi Peräkylä
Chapter 26: The three faces of writing qualitative research: practice, genre and audience - Amir Marvasti