Abstract

Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln’s extraordinarily successful Handbook of Qualitative Research has recently been published in its third edition (Sage Publications, 2005). A substantial book at 1,232 pages, this is undoubtedly something more than a partial revision. The fourteen new topics it introduces include indigenous research, institutional review boards and human subject research, critical and performance ethnography, arts-based inquiry, narrative inquiry, Foucault, the ethics and strategies of on-line research, cultural and investigative poetics and the politics of evaluation. More than half of the forty-five chapters are written by authors new to the Handbook, while returning authors are said to have thoroughly updated their chapters. The publicity material glosses the book as ‘a virtual ‘Who’s Who’ in the human sciences’. Exploitation of new technology, allied to shrewd marketing, had already enabled the paperback publication of the original text in a three-volume set, under the umbrella title of The Landscape of Qualitative Research, and the Handbook’s continuing reiteration and development surely benefits from such changes in printing and production. Like its former incarnations, the 2005 publication is set to figure on the reading lists of research methods courses around the world for some time to come – at least, that is, until a fourth edition is produced.