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Understanding Social Research
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Understanding Social Research
Thinking Creatively about Method

Edited by:


December 2010 | 264 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd

What happens if we take three topics which are significant across the social sciences, and ask researchers of very different methodological and disciplinary persuasions to explain how they have researched them? Understanding Social Research does exactly this, and in the process it elaborates a wide and exciting range of up-to-the minute approaches to research that will be invaluable to students and researchers in the social sciences and related disciplines.

The book explores methodological approaches in three key areas - personal life and relationships; places and mobilities, and socio-cultural change. These work as vehicles to expound methodological issues and challenges that are relevant across a much wider range of domains.

Understanding Social Research brings together leading researchers in the social sciences – including sociology, health, geography, psychology and social statistics - to elaborate their approach to research design and practice, based on their own research experience, and to consider what kinds of knowledge their methods can produce. Each of the contributing authors reflects on their own methods and identifies what is distinctive about them. The book contains fascinating insights into how the knowledge we produce is shaped by the methods we choose and use.

The editors draw methodological issues and concerns that underlie the contributing chapters into creative tension, and consider what we can learn about method, knowledge and epistemology by examining the essence of different approaches when they are applied in real life research. They explore, for example, how the kinds of aims we have for the production of knowledge, and the realities of our everyday research practices, relate to the claims we can make on the basis of our research, and the forms of argument or theories we are able to construct. They consider the implications of this for what we can (and can't) say about the phenomena we investigate, for the methods that we choose and use, and for what is involved in mixing methods.

Understanding Social Research will be useful to students and researchers in the social sciences who want to understand a creative range of approaches to research, and the consequences of making particular methodological choices. It will provide both inspiration and a firm background understanding so that researchers have the confidence and enthusiasm to try out methods and approaches that are not only within but also outside their own comfort zone.


Jennifer Mason and Angela Dale
Creative Tensions in Social Research: Questions of Method
 
PART ONE: RESEARCHING RELATIONSHIPS AND PERSONAL LIFE
Jennifer Mason and Katherine Davies
Experimenting with Qualitative Methods: Researching Family Resemblance
Stephen Frosh and Lisa Saville Young
Using Psychoanalytic Methodology in Psychosocial Research: Researching Brothers
Rachel Thomson
Using Biographical and Longitudinal Methods: Researching Mothering
Nick Crossley
Using Social Network Analysis: Researching Relational Structure
Angela Dale
Using Survey Data: Researching Families and Households
 
PART TWO: RESEARCHING PLACE
Penny Harvey and Hannah Knox
Ethnographies of Place: Researching the Road
Simon Guy and Andrew Karvonen
Using Sociotechnical Methods: Researching Human-Technological Dynamics in the City
Sarah Salway, Kaveri Harriss and Punita Chowbey
Using Participatory, Observational and 'Rapid Appraisal' Methods: Researching Health and Illness
Danny Dorling and Dimitris Ballas
Innovative Ways of Mapping Data about Places
 
PART THREE: RESEARCHING CHANGE
Mike Savage
Using Archived Qualitative Data: Researching Socio-cultural Change
Jeffrey Weeks
What's History Got to Do with It? Researching Sexual Histories
Anne Rogers
Using Qualitative Methods to Complement Randomized Controlled Trials: Researching Mental-Health Interventions
Jane Elliott
Exploring the Narrative Potential of Cohort Data and Event History Analysis
James Nazroo
Using Longitudinal Survey Data: Researching Changing Health in Later Life

Nice broad coverage of social science methods

Professor Toby Ten Eyck
Sociology Dept, Michigan State University
December 3, 2013

Excellent approach for student learning.

Professor Barb LaRue
Health Human Services Programs, Baker College of Port Huron
May 26, 2011

Good overview of method.

Dr Paul Shelton
Schl of Business, George Fox Univ
March 21, 2011

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ISBN: 9781446246566

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