Publications

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…

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…

Issue 11 of WISERD’s Qualitative Researcher contains: Methodological challenges of researching communities – Stephen Burgess, Kate Moles and Robin Smith Using film, video and other multi-media for engaging “hard to reach” young people – Martin O’Neill The role of the researcher: when two social worlds collide – Anne Foley Minding a mendacious methodology: Community-based research…

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…

Fires in urban areas can cause significant economic, physical and psychological damage. Despite this, there has been a comparative lack of research into the spatial and temporal analysis of fire incidence in urban contexts. In this paper, we redress this gap through an exploration of the association of fire incidence to weather, calendar events and…

In this article we explore the ways in which mobile research methods can be utilised to create enabling research environments, encounters and exchanges, generating time and space for participants and researchers to co-generate and communicate meaningful understandings of everyday lives. The article focuses on the use of two mobile methods, ‘guided’ walks and car journey…

The literature on school commercialism, despite a number of successes in battling advertising and marketing in schools, has often seemed to only scratch the surface of corporatization of K‐12 education. While condemning corporations who seek to sell brand‐name products to kids in schools is a relatively straightforward matter, critiquing corporate efforts to promote ideologies, identities,…