Books by Volume editor Max Hayward

Lyn Richards is a sociologist and qualitative researcher who pioneered qualitative software and services for qualitative researchers and now is an independent teacher, writer and consultant. Her academic qualifications are from the universities of Adelaide (Politics B.A.) and La Trobe (Sociology M.A.) where as Reader in Sociology she taught qualitative methods at undergraduate and graduate levels. Her research was in migrant studies and family, health and women's studies. Those projects led to experiments in handling of qualitative data with computers, and with Tom Richards she designed the pioneering NUDIST software (for Nonnumerical Unstructured Data, Indexing, Searching and Theorizing). The next ten years of their professional lives were in QSR International, the company they founded to develop and support the use of NUD*IST and later NVivo. As Director of Research Services Lyn taught and consulted in projects in 13 countries, teaching thousands of researchers, writing methods texts and software documentation, personally training most of the 70 trainers worldwide who supported the software and many of the professors who used it in class. Her tenth book, (if you count books on software) was Handling Qualitative Data: a Practical Guide (Sage, London), telling of much she learned over these years of helping researchers who often had no academic training but wished to do justice to their data, across countries, disciplines and contexts. Like her earlier book with Janice Morse, Readme First, it has been widely used in academic and 'outside' research worlds, and both books have been translated to Japanese.