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Presenting the landmark pioneers' life stories project, this book documents how modern social research in the United Kingdom was shaped. It sheds new light on the lives, methods and motivations of men and women who helped develop a new world of research methodology, pioneered feminist research, and first confronted the issues of race and ethnicity. Many of the pioneers' lives were shaped by the declining decades of the British Empire, and the book begins by highlighting the experiences and practices of the generations who were active from the 1950s to the 1980s, the crucial founding generations for today's social research scene. These were the decades which saw the final phase of colonial anthropology, the explosive growth of sociology in universities, and then the founding of theme-based women's, ethnic and cultural studies and the development of ethical practices and systematic methodologies. The book combines the fascinating history of the generations who built outstanding and influential social research with providing a major resource for current research and especially for methods for future teaching.

Using insights from those with first-hand experience of conducting research in areas of international intervention and conflict across the world, this book provides essential practical guidance, discussion of mistakes, key reflections and raises important questions for researchers and students embarking on fieldwork in violent and closed contexts. Chapters detail personal experiences from areas including the Congo, Sudan, Yemen, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Myanmar, inviting readers into their reflections on mistakes and hard-learned lessons. Divided into sections on issues of control and confusion, security and risk, distance and closeness and sex and sensitivity, the chapters look at how to negotiate complex grey areas and raise important questions that intervention researchers need to consider before, during and after their time on the ground.

From the vantage point of forty years in social research and the study of families, the author of this book offers an invaluable account of how research is conducted and ‘matters’ at particular times. The book has two main themes that are interwoven throughout the text. A central theme is how social research matters in relation to historical context. A second theme focuses on the practice of social research; research is a craft that is learned with and from others as well as through reading methodological texts and training. Although the expertise of the researcher is crucial to all phases of the research process, much of the success of funded research is dependent on collaboration and the creation of conditions that are conducive to team-based research. This fascinating work covers key developments in the field that remain of vital concern to society and demonstrates how social research is an art as well as a science — a process that involves craft and creativity.

Statistical data and evidence-based claims are increasingly central to our everyday lives. Critically examining ‘Big Data’, this book charts the recent explosion in sources of data, including those precipitated by global developments and technological change. It sets out changes and controversies related to data harvesting and construction, dissemination and data analytics by a range of private, governmental and social organisations in multiple settings. Analysing the power of data to shape political debate, the presentation of ideas to us by the media, and issues surrounding data ownership and access, the authors suggest how data can be used to uncover injustices and to advance social progress

There's a growing pressure for social workers to engage with research and draw on this in practice. But why is this research important? This book provides an accessible way to think about this question. Drawing on evidence from across Europe, Asia, and the USA, it covers how research is conducted, used, and perceived. It is perfect for social work students, researchers, and practitioners, providing a detailed sketch of how research finds a place in the wider social work picture and offering opportunities and exercises that highlight how social work research is relevant in day-to-day course programmes and practice. The book will embolden a kind of scepticism, while at the same time providing the ground work for social workers to become more thoughtfully practical and practically thoughtful.

Unlike previous volumes on the subject of ‘doing’ conflict fieldwork, this book does not delineate a clear ‘how to’ toolset for undertaking conflict related research but rather requires the contributors to cast a critical eye on their own research praxis. It brings together scholars working in/on conflict, and through personal accounts of their experiences working in spaces of conflict, explores the role of emotion, violence, uncertainty, identity and positionality within the process of doing research as well as the complexity of methodological choices. This volume thus seeks to go beyond academic-centric conversations about how we can achieve rigour or handle our data collection and rather it aims to draw out the broader implications of such research efforts. By doing so it presents a more nuanced and grounded view of conflict research that is unapologetic and unafraid to demystify and declare the messiness that is inherent in the process of research in/on violence and the potential for violence of research itself.

This book examines the nature of participatory research in the social sciences and its role in increasing participation among vulnerable or marginalised populations. What is meant and understood by vulnerability and participation are issues that are explored in detail in the book, from both the perspectives of researchers and participants alike. Drawing on engaging, in-depth case studies, it examines the ways in which inclusion and collaboration in research can be enhanced among vulnerable participants, such as those with profound learning difficulties, victims of abuse and trauma and multiply vulnerable children and young people, and demonstrates the value and effectiveness of participatory research methods with these groups. Such methods include participatory visual and narrative approaches that help to enhance both participation and emancipation among vulnerable, marginalised populations (including young carers, people with learning difficulties, women victims-survivors of domestic violence) in research processes. The different ethical challenges that arise when conducting participatory research with these groups are also examined in detail in the book and a Participatory Model is also proposed to assist researchers in managing and using participatory research methods in their working practices. The book will be an invaluable resource for research methods students, researchers and academics in many countries who want to put participatory research methods into practice.

This book moves forward the narrative of service user experience and research involvement, using a sociological perspective on experiential knowledge and academic research. It examines the difficulty of having mental health knowledge accepted when it is produced outside traditional scientific settings. It examines how identity shapes knowledge production. It asks why voices which challenge contemporary beliefs about health and the role of treatment are often silenced. It considers ways of ‘doing research’ which bring multiple understandings together effectively. The dangers present in the imbalances of power are addressed frankly, as is the need to be aware of them and to develop ways of working collaboratively to address them. The book also asks a fundamental question: to what extent and to what avail may those with less power collaborate with those with more? All the writers have an academic background and most of them are also service users/ survivors. Their fields of expertise include LGB issues, racial tensions, and recovering from the shame and stigma of alcoholism. They stress the importance of research approaches which involve mutualities of respect and understanding within the worlds of researcher, clinician and service user/survivor.

This sociological collection advances the argument that the concepts of “biography” and "turning point" expand our understanding of life experiences from a descriptive to a deeper, more abstract level of analysis. Theoretically, the collection addresses the manifold ways that we might refine the concept of “turning point” since Anselm Strauss introduced the notion in his 1959 book, Mirrors and Masks: The Search for Identity. The book addresses the conceptual issue of what distinguishes turning points from ages, stages, and life transitions in general and raises crucial questions about the application of turning points as a biographical research method and advances a dialogue with concepts offered by theorists from Andrew Abbott to Max Weber. Biography and turning points in Europe and America distinctive and significant due to its broad empirical database. It includes scholars’ work from nine different countries (Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Russia, the United States and Venezuela), providing a number of contexts (from repudiating gang violence in Venezuela to constructing family narratives in lesbian lives in Britain) for thinking about how turning points relate to biography in an era following the narrative turn. The contributors articulate increasingly globalized concerns in the Western world regarding the identities and simultaneously structuration forces of gender, race-ethnicity, class, sexuality, migration, detention and religion – while they remain, nevertheless, grounded in the unique nations and communities included here. This enables sensitivity to variable constructs of significance that are associated with turning points—from bifurcation and biography to narrative and discursive analysis. In sum, this collection aims to advance a dialogue on turning points in the context of new developments in theory and method.

This edition of this text presents an extensive analysis of the coalition government's social policies. In an expanded first section, experts in a range of policy areas analyse the rationale behind, and implications of, government reforms, whilst the second section examines education policy in an international context.