Social Research Methods - Research

The soundscape of prison life is that of constant clangs, bangs and jangles. What is the significance of this cacophonous din to those who live and work with it? This book is the story of a year spent with a UK prison community, bringing its social world vividly to life through aural ethnography.

In the first dedicated analysis of its kind, international experts review the rationale and results of arts-based approaches to research, teaching, and practice in social work. The book presents examples of their use and methods to evaluate and theorise results and shows how arts can form outputs from research too.

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.

Drawing on interviews with welfare-reliant single mothers living in the South Wales Valleys, this original book charts their interactions with the labour market and welfare state. It challenges current understandings of welfare eligibility and dependency and provides valuable new policy insights for welfare reform.

Uniquely focusing on robberies involving drug dealers and users, this book considers the material and emotional gains and losses to offenders and victims, and offers policy recommendations to reduce occurrences of this common crime.

This edited collection explores and illustrates the nature of research for social justice. Drawing on a diverse range of social research projects, it sets out what a rights-based approach to research looks like, why this framework matters and how we can translate them into operational research.

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.

With case studies from around the world, this accessible book explores the methodological complexities of research into voluntary action, charitable behaviour and participation in voluntary organisations.

Understanding justice, for many, begins with questions of injustice. Giving insights into real life research practices for scholars at all levels, this book aids our understanding of how to employ and live justice through our work and daily lives.

This original collection draws on the latest empirical research to explore the practical challenges facing happiness researchers today. By uniquely combining the critical approach of sociology with techniques from other disciplines, the contributors illuminate new qualitative and biographical approaches of the study of happiness and well-being.

This book examines the role of participants in research and how research ethics can be put into practice. Health, social, and journalistic research are currently subject to very different forms of regulation and codes of practice. By including the experiences of researchers and their subjects the book explores the disciplinary divides.

Drawing on evidence from across Europe, Asia and the USA, this accessible book covers how social workers can engage with research and draw on it in practice.