Social research methods

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.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. This book examines the increasing importance of engagement with non-academic groups and actors in the co-production of knowledge and real-world influence in academic research.

Writing is more difficult than it seems. This e-book will get you started and keep you going. It demystifies the craft of writing, and offers lots of tips and ideas to make writing manageable.

In this Byte, the contributions consider the way that digitally meditated social processes are transforming institutions. It examines the interconnectedness of institutions and considers digitization across schooling, work, and media, with an eye on inequality.

The pieces in this Byte raise important questions about what it means to bring our embodied selves into contact with digital media technologies. The selections expand our understanding of what it means to live in and through bodies augmented by digital technologies within a deeply unequal social world.

When you've collected all your data, what do you do next? Whether it's qualitative or quantitative, this e-book explains how to prepare, code, and analyse your data. The book offers clear guidance to help you turn a morass of raw data into cogent findings.

Data collection is often the first thing people think of in connection with research. This e-book outlines some of the key issues and offers lots of short-cuts to save you time and stress.

In reality, people need to fit research in with all their other commitments. This e-book is full of practical hints and tips to show you how to manage research alongside work, family, and social life.

This book provides a practical and concise introductory guide to doing research with children and young people, outlining the benefits and challenges along with key ethical, methodological and other considerations. Throughout, there are practical examples, checklists and top tips to aid the reader.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. The book is a guide to how the measurement of violence can be best achieved. It shows how to make femicide, rape, domestic violence, and FGM visible in official statistics and offers practical guidance on definitions, indicators and coordination mechanisms.

This practitioner-oriented text is the first to help social researchers define research projects, manage the social research process, engage with stakeholders and influence change. It will be invaluable for all those commissioning, managing and conducting social research.