Social Research Methods

Combining a compulsive read with rigorous academic analysis, this book tells the real-life stories of drug dealers involved in county lines networks. This myth-busting, accessible book offers a new way of thinking about drug crime prevention, intervention and enforcement.

Avoiding both over-simplification and jargon-riddled complexity, this book is an invaluable, straightforward guide to participatory research for you and your fellow practitioners working with community groups and organisations.

Presenting the complexities of doing planning work, with its moral and practical dilemmas, this rich ethnographic study analyses today’s planning scene through the stories of four diverse working environments.

Through stories and visual vignettes, it presents a range of stakeholders involved in the design, construction, management and habitation of third-age housing in the UK, highlighting the importance of design decisions for the everyday lives of older people.

This book sets out practical and theoretically robust approaches for understanding and tracking change that any organisation can use to evaluate their contribution to social change and become more efficient and effective.

This book demonstrates how an ethics of care can help researchers work through challenges and solve complex issues. Keeping social justice at the heart of research, the book shows how an ethics of care can provide a systematic approach supporting good judgements about research practices from inception to impact.

This interdisciplinary activist research project shows the health and well-being impacts of transnational migration on Ecuadorean families. Roberta Villalón documents the intersection of social inequalities and migration and health policies, and how individual and collective action challenges marginalising structures and fosters social justice.

This book invites the reader to think about collaborative research differently. Using the concepts of ‘letting go’ and 'poetics’, it envisions collaborative research as a space where relationships are forged with the use of arts-based and multimodal ways of seeing, inquiring, and representing ideas.

This important book offers practical advice for using evidence and research in policymaking. Covering important policy areas including the GM debate, the environment and Black Lives Matter, each chapter in the book assesses the ethical challenges, the status of evidence in explaining or describing the issue and possible solutions to the problem.

This original study of the lives of prisoners’ families adds a feminist perspective on the understanding of carceral geography. She relates the testimonies of families as they navigate new challenges, and measures the impact of imprisonment on their emotions, relationships, identities and experiences of spaces, both inside and outside prison.

The ‘ndrangheta is one of wealthiest and most powerful criminal organizations today. Combining autobiography, travel ethnography, memoir, and investigative journalism, this book provides a global outlook on the ‘ndrangheta, taking the reader to small villages and locations in Italy and in different countries around the world.

Drawing on interviews with journalists and police officers, this is the first ethnographic study of crime news reporting in the UK for over 25 years. It shows the impediments to crime reporting that exist in the aftermath of the Leveson Report and considers the future of investigative journalism non-profits.