Nicholas Walliman is a qualified architect and Senior Lecturer in the School of the Built Environment at Oxford Brookes University and a researcher associate in the Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development. After many years of practice in architecture in the UK and abroad, he returned to academic life to do his PhD. This experience raised his interest in research theory and methods, and he was subsequently asked by the university to write a distance learning course to guide postgraduate students embarking on research degrees. This course provided the raw material and incentive for writing