These four volumes provide a comprehensive and authoritative survey of the European tradition in qualitative research. The editors define `qualitative' to refer to a broad range of procedures and operations used by sociologists and anthropologists in their interpretation and explanation of social and ethnographic data. The collection includes contributions from the classic tradition to contemporary work. The subjects addressed include: documentary methods, textual analysis, non-textual analysis, interviews, questionnaires, field observations, case study methods, qualitative analysis of small social units, comparative analysis, historical analysis, concept formation, classifying and constructing typologies, content analysis, model-building and verstehen methods.

The four volumes are organized as follows:

Volume 1: Collecting Data

This volume explores the use of personal written documents, newspaper analysis, the analysis of official documents, fiction, scientific texts, non-textual data analysis, interviews, questionnaires, field observations and case studies.

Volume 2: Selecting A Type of Approach and Building Concepts

This volume focuses on the monographic method, description and explanation, the qualitative analysis of small units, methods of comparative analysis and methods of historical analysis, questions of the nature of value-free research, ideal type conceptualization, provisory definition, the construction of the sociological object, methods of description, classifying typologies, multidimensional classification and polythetic classification.

Volume 3: Building Theories

In addition to a section on content analysis this volume investigates methods of observation and comparison, rules dealing with `social facts', epistemology, mechanistic models, biological models, analogy and homology and the method of verstehen.

Volume 4: Explaining and Understanding and Finding Out the Right Theoretical Frame

Continuing with an investigation of the method of verstehen this volume focuses on phenomenological sociology, the rational choice model, cognitive and axiological rationality and how competing theories explain the same phenomenon.