Publications

In recent years, the UK Government and devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have all stresses the pivotal role of the skills agenda as a key driver in tackling a wide range of economic and social problems. Notably, the Leitch Review of Skills stated that ‘skills is the most important lever within our…

This paper aims to review the state of play of GIS use in measuring accessibility to services drawing on work in areas such as health, public services, transport and environmental justice. The first section describes what is meant by ‘accessibility’ in the context of our research. To date this has predominantly been concerned with measures…

In this chapter we focus on our field studies of different clinical spaces in one large UK regional teaching hospital and how they perform different, yet, perhaps, complementary kinds of ‘medicine’: emergency, genetic and critical care medicine. We focus on those moments and processes through which patients do, or do not, gain access to the…

Significantly, within the Welsh Assembly Government, all crime, public space and policing matters are housed under the umbrella of community safety and Social Justice. The Welsh Assembly Government’s approach to these matters, from the appointment of the first minister of Social Justice and Regeneration in 2003 has been an attempt to locate responses to crime…

This paper outlines two methods we used in Connected Lives: one of four projects of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods: Real Life Methods Node. Connected Lives was a qualitatively driven mixed-method research project exploring networks, neighbourhoods and community. We set out to understand the dynamic, processual and contingent nature of relations within an…

Welcome to the eleventh issue of Qualitative Researcher – the first to be produced by the new editorial team who are all Cardiff-based staff working in the newly established Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD). So why the changes? For the past four years, Qualitative Researcher has been produced by…

Increasingly in the field of conducting research based regeneration initiatives in disadvantaged or disengaged communities there is a growing realization of the importance of developing a more egalitarian participatory based approach to the research enterprise and the whole political process that is involved (Bowler et al 2007), i.e. establishing greater dialogue and reciprocity between researcher…

Researching marginalised communities is often thwarted by a number of ethical and moral problems. As social scientists, we are driven by the need to develop a greater understanding of how different actors make sense of their social world (Coffey and Atkinson 1996). Yet, representing data on marginalised communities can have many implications; potentially, we can…

This paper sets out a conversation concerning some of the methodological and ethical issues we have encountered as part of our participation in, and research of, a prominent contemporary movement for community change and relocalization. In discussing the ethnographic methods we use to research the Transition Town movement1 we feel both duty-bound and inspired to…