This is the book we've all been waiting for: a practical, accessible, and deeply informed handbook to the nuts and bolts of how to do interviews and participant observation. A masterful guide that is perfect for teaching. Even the most seasoned researcher will appreciate Lareau's many insights and examples as they undertake their next research project. -- Shamus Khan, Professor of Sociology and American Studies, Princeton University
In Listening to People, Lareau provides insight into the practicalities of interview-based research and participation observation. This is an excellent and exciting guide that offers useful recommendations to researchers before they land in the field. * LSE Review of Books *
Annette Lareau has translated her expert research practice into an accessible and awesomely instructive book that covers interviewing and field work from conception to publication. Listening to People takes the mystery out of the methods and reduces the anxiety of interjecting ourselves into other people's lives. This book will, no doubt, be the standard text in training the next generation of writers, journalists, and researchers who listen for a living. -- Mary Pattillo, author of Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class
Annette Lareau has written a wonderfully clear, truly insightful, and deeply personal guide to producing high-quality qualitative research. Organized around tools of listening and thinking as you go, she brings to light often unstated methods of first-rate research practice.
-- Margaret Eisenhart, Distinguished Professor Emerita, University of Colorado Boulder
This is not only the best general guide to ethnographic research that I've seen (in 40 years of reading them) but also really a remarkable intellectual achievement as a seemingly easily written product of, I'm sure, years of exhaustive work. It appears to be a methods book, not a substantive contribution to sociological knowledge, but, because it is essentially a social psychology of the process of becoming an ethnographer, it's both.
-- Jack Katz, Research Professor of Sociology, UCLA
Listening to People is the book I have been searching for since I was a graduate student. It is the book everyone who hopes to produce high-quality qualitative research needs to read. Annette Lareau has assembled a veritable treasure trove of practical advice for the qualitative researcher based on her more than 40 years of experience in the field. The book is an honest and painstakingly detailed guide to conducting qualitative research from start (project inception) to finish (analysis, writing, and publication). It moves beyond the general how to guidance of other books to address all the minutia and peculiar realities of qualitative research. Listening to People will save future generations of qualitative researchers from the lessons that so many of us had to learn the hard way and from which some of us are still trying to recover.
-- Karolyn Tyson, Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Professor, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
This book offers an unusually candid and compassionate lens into the process of qualitative research. Lareau provides concrete examples at every step. Not only interview questions, probes and field-notes, but elevator speeches, introductory emails, article introductions, coding schemes, manuscript reviews, and so on. She demystifies each stage of the research process. With authority, experience, and deep humility, Lareau makes a wonderful guide. Listening to People will appeal to scholars at all levels. -- Amy Steinbugler, Associate Professor of Sociology, Dickinson College
