Research methods: general

Avoiding both over-simplification and jargon-riddled complexity, this book is an invaluable, straightforward guide to participatory research for you and your fellow practitioners working with community groups and organisations.

This book uses qualitative longitudinal data, from repeat interviews with people subject to compulsion and sanction in their everyday lives, to analyse the effectiveness and ethicality of welfare conditionality in promoting and sustaining behaviour change in the UK.

This book demonstrates how an ethics of care can help researchers work through challenges and solve complex issues. Keeping social justice at the heart of research, the book shows how an ethics of care can provide a systematic approach supporting good judgements about research practices from inception to impact.

This book invites the reader to think about collaborative research differently. Using the concepts of ‘letting go’ and 'poetics’, it envisions collaborative research as a space where relationships are forged with the use of arts-based and multimodal ways of seeing, inquiring, and representing ideas.

This important book offers practical advice for using evidence and research in policymaking. Covering important policy areas including the GM debate, the environment and Black Lives Matter, each chapter in the book assesses the ethical challenges, the status of evidence in explaining or describing the issue and possible solutions to the problem.

Since the mid-2010s, virtual reality (VR) technology has advanced rapidly. This book explores the many opportunities that VR can offer for humanities and social sciences researchers. It provides a user-friendly, non-technical methods guide to using ready-made VR content and 360° video as well as creating custom materials.

In the first dedicated analysis of its kind, international experts review the rationale and results of arts-based approaches to research, teaching, and practice in social work. The book presents examples of their use and methods to evaluate and theorise results and shows how arts can form outputs from research too.

Encouraging critical consideration of research design, the book guides readers step-by-step through the process of planning and undertaking a research project based on documentary analysis. It covers selecting a research topic and sample through to analysing and writing up the data.

Using two key visual pedagogical tools, this book shows you how to produce vibrant and stimulating in-depth qualitative research that draws on data readily available via the internet. Concise, practical and jam-packed with valuable tips, this book will enable you to complete a successful desk-based research project you can be proud of.

Including contributions on qualitative and digital research from Europe, Asia, Africa, Australasia and the Americas, this volume explores the creative and thoughtful ways in which researchers have adapted methods and rethought relationships in response to challenges arising from crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, disasters or violent conflict.

Providing practical guidance based on real-life examples, this book shows researchers different forms and ways of keeping a research journal and how to get the most out of journaling. Giving researchers licence to do things differently, the book encourages and enables readers to develop their own sense of researcher identity and voice.

This book shows researchers how ethnography can be carried out within human service settings, providing an invaluable guide on how to apply ethnographic creativeness and offering a more humanistic and context-sensitive approach to generating valid knowledge about today’s service work.