Martin Bauer

   Martin W. Bauer is a social psychologist, currently Head of the department of the Methodology Institute at the London School of Economics. He directs the MSc in Social and Public Communication at the Institute of Social Psychology. Martin Bauer was a Research Fellow in 'Public Understanding of Science' at the Science Museum in London, an academic visitor to the Maison Des Sciences de l'Homme in Paris, and he teaches regularly in Brazil at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul and thePontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul. Martin Bauer was educated at the University of Bern in Switzerland and trained at the London School of Economics. He joined the LSE’s Institute of Social Psychology and Methodology Institute in September 1994.Martin Bauer is well known for developing the toblerone model of social representations with George Gaskell. He is also well known for his edited handbook with George Gaskell, Qualitative Researching with Text, Image and Sound: A Practical Handbook (2000), which provides a comprehensive and accessible introduction to a broad range of research methods with the objective of clarifying procedures, good practice and public accountability. Following an introduction which discusses quality and quantity, and how these relate to issues of representation and knowledge interests in social research.

   The book is organized into four parts: · Part I covers different ways of collecting data and different types of data relating to text, image and sound: corpus construction, individual and group interviewing, narrative and episodic interviewing, video and film, and bemetology.  Part II introduces the main analytic approaches for text, image and sound: classical content analysis, argumentation, discourse, conversation analysis, rhetoric, semiotics, analysis of moving images, and of noise and music - each includes an introduction with examples and step-by-step advice on how to do it. · Part III covers computer-assisted analysis - including computer-assisted qualitative data analysis and key-word-in-context analysis. · Part IV addresses issues of good practice, looking at problems and fallacies in interpretation and develops quality criteria for qualitative research. This book provides researchers with the skills and knowledge to make the appropriate choices between different methods, types of data, and analytic procedures, and gives examples and criteria of good practice for each one.