Social Research Methods - Research

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 on an unprecedented institutional ethnography of UK universities, this book uses feminist and gender lenses to critique the power, culture and structure of Higher Education institutions. Challenging the myths of how academia is governed by audit processes, it provides an opportunity to re-read and re-write these institutions from within.

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.

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.

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.

This perceptive study explores the extent to which boxing has the potential to reduce violent attitudes among young offenders. Jump assesses conflicting evidence and presents in-depth case studies of fighters to ask whether boxing’s values of discipline and respect can create a support network that helps young men refrain from reoffending.

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.

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 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.

Available open access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This book examines remedies for improving public trust and the legitimacy of science. It reviews policy approaches adopted by governments and offers an original analysis of the political roots of the impact and public engagement agenda, shedding light on the wider connections to democracy.

This book explores the recent experiences of diverse paid care workers in four very different national contexts – Finland, Canada, South Africa and England – to learn from their experiences during COVID-19 and its aftermath.