I just stumbled on the book Constructing Methodology for Qualitative Research: Researching Education and Social Practices, published in 2015 and edited by Bobby Harreveld, Mike Danaher, Celeste Lawson, Bruce Allen Knight, and Gillian Busch.

From a quick skim, it looks like it has some useful reflections on getting started with qualitative research when you already have experience as a quantitative researcher.

Here’s a teaser from the Introduction:

Qualitative research is a broad church encompassing a bewildering profusion of similarity with elusive differences often requiring years of immersion to understanding its scholarship. Those seeking this understanding, bring with them ways of knowing their worlds that both challenge and are challenged by the fundamental tenets of qualitative research. In this process, non-linearity is foregrounded and situated in the interdisciplinary spaces of qualitative research. Most significantly, it highlights researchers’ experiences manoeuvring through the ‘-ologies’ of a qualitative research paradigm, namely, its ontology (nature of its reality), epistemology (the relationship between the researcher and what can be known about that reality), axiology (values underpinning the ethical stance of the research process), and its methodology (how to go about investigating what can/could be known) (Punch, 2014). This focus on methodological manoeuvring is fundamental to the construction of a qualitatively framed research worldview or paradigm that engages with the ‘why’ behind the methods of data collection and analysis to encapsulate the actuality of experiences.

(Emphasis added.) Looks useful, and I wish I had known about it as a younger researcher when I first turned my eyes toward qualitative research to answer some gnarly “why” questions.

The book seems very practical, with a lot of personal reflections on what was challenging and how budding qualitative researchers chose to make methodological decisions.

For education researchers specifically, Chapters 2, 7, 14, and 15 are relevant.

Chapter 13 (by Steven Pace) discusses Grounded Theory, opening with this anonymous quote:

I’m basically using grounded theory as my research method, but I’m not going to call it that. I’m going to refer to it as “qualitative data analysis” to avoid getting into any debates about the right way to do grounded theory.

I know I’m not the only human-computer interaction researcher to have expressed exactly the same sentiment!

Pace gives seven tangible suggestions, but in my opinion the most important is this one:

Explain the approach that you are taking to the research method in any publications arising from your research.

In HCI, that’s often the best approach as an author, and as a reviewer I always look for clear explanations of the approach used, as naming a contested method like Grounded Theory can imply many different and conflicting approaches.