Steinar Kvale is Professor of Educational Psychology and Director of the Centre of Qualitative Research at the University of Aarhus, and adjunct faculty at Saybrook Institute, San Fransisco. He was born in Norway and and graduated from the University of Oslo. He continued his studies at the University of Heidelberg with an Alexander von Humboldt scholarship, and has been a visiting professor at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, and West Georgia University, Carrolton, and the University of Bergen. His long-term concern has been with the implications of such continental philosophies as phenomenology, hermeneutics, and dialectics for psychology and education. He has studied examinations and… grading, and is the author of Pr�fung und Herrschaft (1972). He has edited Issues of Validity in Qualitative Research (1989) and Psychology and Postmodernism (1992). Together with Klaus Nielsen he has edited Mesterl�re - L�ring som social praksis (Apprenticeship ? Learning as Social Practice, 1999) and Praktikkens l�ringslandskab ? At l�re gennem arbejde (The learning landscape of practice ? Learning through work, 2003)
Karin Olson is a Professor in the Faculty of Nursing and a Distinguished Scholar in the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Her research is focused on symptom experience in advanced cancer. She is especially interested in documenting links between behavioral and physiological processes associated with symptom experience and in developing methodological approaches for showing the social construction of symptom experience.