Social Research Methods

Over the past decades ‘photovoice’ has emerged as a participatory and creative research method where participants capture and discuss their reality through photographs. This unprecedented ‘how-to’ book takes novice and experienced researchers through the practicalities and ethics of applying this approach.

A logically ordered guide to analysing everyday problems, SPSS Step by Step is distinctive in being both easy to grasp and readable.

This book is the first specifically to explore methodological issues relating to the involvement of refugees in both service evaluation and development and research. It builds on a two-year seminar series funded by the ESRC where the participants jointly drew up a set of good practice guidelines that are re-produced in the book for the first time.

Systemic Action Research explains how systemic thinking works and how it can be embedded into organisational structures and processes to catalyse sustainable change and critical local interventions.

With a diverse range of case studies, and chapters co-written between academics and community partners, this book shows that co-produced research can be an empowering force by which communities stake a claim in the places they live.

This book shows how community groups can work in partnership with universities to imagine better futures and make them happen, co-producing knowledge to achieve positive change.

Drawing from forty years of experience, Julia Brannen offers an invaluable account of how research in family studies is conducted and ‘matters’ at particular times. An exceptional resource for family scholars and those interested in the methodology of social research.

This book innovatively explores how we can better apply a ‘bottom-up’ approach to the design of regulatory systems that recognise the capabilities, knowledge, passions and creativity of citizens in communities at the margins.

Measuring research impact and engagement is a much debated topic in the UK and internationally. This book is the first to provide a critical review of the research impact agenda, situating it within international efforts to improve research utilisation.

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.

This book addresses the frustrating gap between research conducted on effective practices and the lack of routine use of such practices. The author introduces a model for reducing this gap, highlighting the roles of social networks, research evidence, practitioner/policymaker decision-making, research-practice-policy partnerships.

This unique study of social work provides a bold and challenging view of the subject from an anthropological perspective. Combining research and personal reflection, it explores cultural and symbolic representations of social work, evolving identities of social work practitioners and the ways in which they and society now view one another.