Cyhoeddiadau

A large body of research has examined relationships between accessibility to green space and a variety of health outcomes with many researchers finding benefits in terms of levels of physical activity and relationships with levels of obesity, mental health, and other health conditions. Such studies often use spatial analytical techniques to examine relationships between distance…

WISERD Qualitative Research Issue 14 contains: Reflections on the craft(ing) of qualitative research – Robin Smith Local music practices and the cultural economy: three spaces of research – Darren Roberts Reading the researcher’s body – Morgan Windram-Geddes Beyond tagging, poking and throwing sheep: Using Facebook in social research – Gareth Thomas Transcription as a ‘research…

It has become somewhat of a truism that qualitative research, and particularly fieldwork, cannot be taught but is best learnt in practice, out there, in the field. This can likely be traced to the early days of the Chicago School where students were sent out to study a tract of the census, or neighbourhood, at…

Over the past decade there have been a number of calls from across the social sciences to engage music as both the object of study and a tool for research (cf. Revill, 2000; Connell and Gibson, 2003; Wood et al., 2007). These calls come at time when major shifts in technology and cultural economic policy…

This paper draws from a qualitative PhD study in Central Scotland to focus on research participants’ interpretations of my (the researcher’s) body. The research investigated the embodied experiences of health among girls aged 10-14 (P6-S4)1, through discursive spaces of schoolbased physical activity. In three Scottish secondary schools, participant observation and semi-structured interviews were conducted with…

Much excitement, public and scholastic, surrounds the ascent of Facebook, a social-networking website attracting over 500 million users since its inception in 2004. Facebook has been increasingly integrated into the public sphere, proliferating media activities, communication practices, and social experiences. It has become a glowing reference to the mounting centrality of internet technologies in our…

Transcription of interview material can be a daunting task for the qualitative researcher, not only in terms of the extensive time requirement, but also due to concerns around producing transcripts that ‘accurately’ reflect interviews. This reflection paper addresses some of the tensions I experienced as a geography student encountering transcription for the first time. It…

The argument for access to sensitive unit-level data produced within government is usually framed in terms of risk, and the legal responsibility to maintain confidentiality, even where the government has a duty to provide data. This paper argues that the way the question is framed may be restricting the set of possibilities; and that the…

The ethical governance of social research is now well entrenched within the academy in the UK and elsewhere. Whereas, in the not so distant past, ethical research practice was a matter for the researcher to articulate and manage, research ethics are now a matter for institutions to govern. Departmental or University ethics committees or boards…

Statistical disclosure control (SDC) in a research environment poses particular problems. Most SDC research is concerned with ensuring that a finite set of tabular outputs are safe from disclosure, or that microdatasets are sufficiently anonymised. By its nature, a research environment is one where confidential data is made available for analysis with very few restrictions….