Qualitative Research Practice

Clive Seale has been Professor of Sociology (or Medical Sociology) at Goldsmiths and Queen Mary's (both University of London) and Brunel University. His work has concerned communication in health care and death in modern society. He has published extensively on research methods. His books include Constructing Death: the sociology of dying and bereavement (Cambridge University Press, 1998), The Quality of Qualitative Research (Sage, 1999), Media and Health (Sage, 2003) and Gender and the Language of Illness (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010, with Jonathan Charteris-Black). Recently, he has turned to fiction, publishing a novel, Interrogating Ellie (Cloiff Books, 2015) using the pen name Julian Gray. He is currently writing another novel.
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, where he is now Emeritus Professor in the Sociology Department as well as Visiting Professor in the Business Schools, King's College, London, Leeds University and University of Technology Sydney and Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Education, Queensland University of Technology. He is interested in conversation and discourse analysis and he has researched medical consultations, shelters for homeless people and HIV-test counselling.

He is the author of Doing Qualitative Research (sixth edition, 2022) and A Very Short, Fairly Interesting, Reasonably Cheap Book about Qualitative Research (second edition, 2013c). He is the editor of Qualitative Research (fifth edition, 2021) and the Sage series Introducing Qualitative Methods. In recent years, he has offered short, hands-on workshops in qualitative research for universities in Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.

Now retired from full-time work, he aims to watch 100 days of county cricket a year. He also enjoys spending time with his grandchildren and great-grandsons as well as voluntary work in an old people's home where he chats and sings with residents.


Jaber F. Gubrium is professor and chair of sociology at the University of Missouri. He has an extensive record of research on the social organization of care in human service institutions. His publications include numerous books and articles on aging, family, the life course, medicalization, and representational practice in therapeutic context. Giampietro Gobo is Professor of Methodology of Social Research and Sociology of Science at the University of Milan (Italy). He was one of the founders of the 'Qualitative Methods' Research Network of the European Sociological Association.

His interests concern scientific controversies on health issues and workplace studies. He is currently undertaking projects on immunization and COVID-19 policies, and ethnographic experiments in the area of cooperation in small teamwork. His books include Doing Ethnography (Sage, 2008), Qualitative Research Practice (co-edited with C. Seale, J. F. Gubrium and D. Silverman, Sage, 2004) and Constructing Survey Data: An Interactional Approach (with S. Mauceri, Sage, 2014).