Think of a research journal and you may imagine a well-thumbed notebook replete with insightful entries, answers to research questions and a chronicle of the key moments that led to this point. However, as Nicole Brown (author of Making the Most of You…
Category: research methods
Reading List: Neglected Cases in the Social Sciences
In Model Cases: On Canonical Research Objects and Sites, Monika Krause explores how scholars in the social sciences and humanities repeatedly draw on particular cases and research objects, shaping our understanding of more general ideas in disproportio…
Book Review: Causal Inference: The Mixtape by Scott Cunningham
In Causal Inference: The Mixtape, Scott Cunningham offers a new guide to methods for determining cause and effect in the social sciences. In summarising, systematising and prioritising methodological tools for researchers, this book will be of use to a…
How models change the world – and what we should do about it
Models that make predictions about the COVID-19 pandemic are complicated by the fact that people change their behaviour in response to these predictions. Lucie White discusses how we can deal with this, based on a recent paper with Philippe van Basshuy…
The hitchhiker’s guide to co-production: Six ways to link knowledge and action for sustainability
By directly linking research processes to change makers, co-production promises to create more impactful knowledge and actions. However, what co-production means in practice is not always clear or consistent. Drawing on the experiences of 32 co-product…
F**k Ups in Social Research: Learning from what goes ‘wrong’
What happens when research goes wrong, or at least, is perceived to go wrong? How do researchers manage, or indeed fail to manage, the unexpected, and what new intellectual developments might be made possible through engagement with ‘failures’? Jason H…
An Innocuous Quote by Interviewee 11: Re-thinking interviews in social research
In this cross-post, Shamser Sinha discusses the limitations of traditional forms of qualitative analysis and suggests social researchers have much to learn from creative professions, where are wider range of sensory and temporal inputs contribute to ne…
Are we all social scientists now? The rise of citizen social science raises more questions about social science than it answers.
Citizen social science, whereby members of the public participate in the investigation and analysis of social phenomena, is becoming an increasingly common research method, especially to address localised social issues. In this post, Alexandra Albert¸ …
Lost in co-production: To enable true collaboration we need to nurture different academic identities.
Involving stakeholders directly in the research process and co-production have become common features of research designs aimed at delivering impact. However, in practice co-production often comes into conflict with more conventional research methods a…
Reflecting on discomfort in research
Feelings of discomfort can arise in research, especially research that works across differences in social power and status. In this post Rachelle Chadwick discusses the role of discomfort in research methods and how recognising and ‘staying with’ discomfort can positively shape qualitative research methods. I’ll start with a confession: I didn’t want to write this … Continued