Designing Qualitative Research

Catherine Marshall is the William Eaves Distinguished Professor Emerita of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After completing her PhD, she served on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and at Vanderbilt University before settling as professor at North Carolina. The ongoing goal of her teaching and research has been to use an interdisciplinary approach to analyze the cultures of schools, state policy cultures, gender issues, and social justice issues. She has published extensively on the politics of education, qualitative methodology, women's access to careers, and socialization, language, and values in educational administration.

Marshall's honors include the Campbell Award for Lifetime Intellectual Contributions to the Field, given by the Politics of Education Association (2009); the University Council for Educational Administration's Campbell Award for Lifetime Achievement and Contributions to Educational Administration (2008); the American Educational Research Association's (AERA) Willystine Goodsell Award for her scholarship, activism, and community building on behalf of women and education (2004); and a Ford Foundation grant for Social Justice Leadership (2002). In the American Educational Association, she was elected to head the Politics and Policy Division, and she also created an AERA Special Interest Group called Leadership for Social Justice. Marshall is the author or editor of numerous other books. These include Activist Educators: Breaking Past Limits; Culture and Education Policy in the American States; The Assistant Principal: Leadership Choices and Challenges; The New Politics of Gender and Race; and Feminist Critical Policy Analysis. This book's origin came early in her scholarly career, while conducting qualitative research on policy and teaching literally hundreds of doctoral students how to adopt and adapt the qualitative approach into workable proposals. She recognized a need and began to develop this book.

Gretchen B. Rossman is Professor Emerita of International Education and 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 15 books, 2 of which are editions of major qualitative research texts (Learning in the Field, third edition, with Sharon F. Rallis, and the present seventh edition of Designing Qualitative Research, with Catherine Marshall and Gerardo L. Blanco--both widely used guides for qualitative inquiry). In addition, she has published a book titled The Research Journey: An Introduction to Inquiry (with Sharon Rallis). She has also authored or coauthored more than 50 articles, book chapters, and technical reports focused on methodological issues in qualitative research synthesis, mixed-methods evaluation, and ethical research practice, as well as the analysis and evaluation of educational reform efforts both in the United States and internationally.

Professor Rossman has served as principal investigator (PI) or co-PI on several large U.S. Agency for International Development-funded projects (in Palestine, the Southern Sudan, Malawi, Tanzania, and India); as co-PI on a World Bank-funded multigrade schooling project (Senegal and Gambia); as lead trainer for a Save the Children-funded participatory monitoring and evaluation of professional training (Azerbaijan); and 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.

Gerardo L. Blanco is Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Higher Education, and Academic Director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College's Lynch School of Education and Human Development. He received his Ed.D. in Educational Policy and Leadership, with a concentration in Higher Education, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Prior to joining Boston College, he served on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts Boston and at the University of Connecticut. His research explores the intersections of quality and internationalization in higher education and is motivated by a commitment to global social justice and a deep curiosity for the ways higher education institutions define, improve and communicate their value to different stakeholder groups. The author of over 30 journal articles to date, his research has been published in Higher Education, Studies in Higher Education, the Comparative Education Review, and the Review of Higher Education. In 2017, he received the "Best Research Article Award" from the Comparative & International Education Society's Higher Education SIG. In 2014 and 2020, his work received honorable mentions from the same organization.

Blanco is a Fulbright Specialist; his teaching, research and consulting have taken place in 15 countries and 5 continents. He has been a visiting faculty member at Shaanxi Normal University (China), visiting expert at the International Centre for Higher Education Research (INCHER) at the University of Kassel (Germany) and teaching fellow at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (Poland).