Review of “Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research”

Abstract

Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research is a wonderful book that should be required reading for all graduate students in Sociology; indeed, it is a useful guide for any social science discipline that incorporates both quantitative and qualitative training. The book’s exceptionalism lies in the combination of its accessible prose, its clear-eyed discussion of why we need shared standards, its practicality, and its elegant construction of guiding principles for evaluating qualitative research. The principles presented are clear and cogent yet not rigid, providing insightful ideas about what to expect of the best qualitative research while allowing for a sizable variation in how researchers might achieve their goals. The book’s authors, Mario Luis Small and Jessica McCrory Calarco, are the perfect pair to write this book; each has authored celebrated work that rely on both interviewing and ethnography, and both have devoted considerable thought to matters of qualitative research (Calarco 2011, 2014, 2018a, 2018b; Small 2004, 2009, 2015, 2017).