Publications

The contrast between the Welsh Assembly Government’s stance on higher education tuition fees and that of the UK government hit the headlines recently. But Gareth Rees, Director of the Wales Institute for Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD), questions whether currently devolved powers are sufficiently robust to sustain this distinctive Welsh policy.

Issue 13 of WISERD’s Qualitative Researcher contains: Revisiting innovation in qualitative research – Amanda Coffey Stripping out the social: Innovation and reduction in contemporary qualitative methods – William Housley and Robin James Smith Visual methods: Innovation, decoration or distractions? – Max Travers Computer assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS): A personal view – Kate Ness…

In this short paper we take issue with some recent developments in the design and application of qualitative research which, to our mind, are indicative of a reductionist tendency. As discussed previously (Atkinson, Delamont, and Housley, 2009 Housley and Smith, Forthcoming), ‘qualitative methods’ are increasingly deployed across disciplinary boundaries and are to be found in…

In this issue of Qualitative Researcher we return to questions of innovation within qualitative research practice. Readers will be aware of the many recent calls to methodological development and innovation across the social sciences. These have stemmed partly from the external environments within which and against which social scientific research is situated. There are increasing…

Qualitative mobile methods are heralded as innovative ways to involve participants, disrupting the power dynamics of the static interview and allowing the production of a co-constructed knowledge, between the researcher, the participant and the landscape. Much of this practice is informed by an understanding of place as something fluid, mutually produced and constructed. Previously we…

Whether they capture the still or moving image, visual methods are the oldest new methods in qualitative research. Anthropologists from Malinowski (1929) onwards have included photographs in field reports, and in later decades made films about different cultures (Ball and Smith 1992). Sociologists trained in symbolic interactionism such as Howard Becker (1974) and Doug Harper…

Computer software is increasingly used to assist in the analysis of ‘qualitative’, particularly ethnographic, data. It is widely agreed to help in organising and controlling data. It is claimed by some to increase the researcher’s closeness to the data (Lewins and Silver, 2005), though others say the opposite (MacMillan, 2005). This paper gives an outsider’s,…

The paper explores the ways girls appropriate gender through actions, gesture and talk to achieve things in primary school science classrooms. It draws on socio-cultural approaches to show that when everyday classroom practices are viewed from multiple planes of analysis, historical, institutional and in the micro dynamics of classroom interaction, gender comes into view in…

Global concerns such as climate change and food security have focused renewed attention on the future of rural space. Although the direct engagement of rural geographers with climate change and food security has been limited to date, recent research in rural geography holds a number of lessons on these issues, highlighting, for example, spatial and…

Network management is viewed as a way of dealing with uncertainty in complex policy networks, but little is known about the types of network management strategies employed by regional actors to manage vertical and horizontal relations. Two central questions guide this paper. What network management strategies were employed to manage complexity and uncertainty in regional…