Description: This is a course about doing qualitative social research in public health. One of its major goals is very practical and down to earth: acquiring the strategies and techniques needed to conduct qualitative research on human behavior. But the course also aspires to understand the philosophical, ethical, and political issues involved in the practice of social science within public health. The course will focus upon five phases of the research process: l) pre-research dilemmas and decisions, 2) theory and the formulation of the research question or hypothesis, 3) design, sampling, and data collection, 4) stages of data analysis, and 5) the implications of qualitative knowledge for representation of "subjects" and the expression of this knowledge in the form of written reports or publications.
