Publications

Aging Horizons Bulletin, 2010 March / April Issue Time to bring grandfathers out of the shadows. Grandparents are playing a vital part in many families today, yet few studies have focused on the role of grandfathers. According to Dr. Robin Mann, the significance of grandfatherhood for men has been underestimated. Mann is associate research fellow…

The Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD) is a major new collaborative socio‐economic research programme involving five higher education institutions in Wales. This paper introduces the work of the WISERD data integration team and describes their plans for the development of an online geo‐portal. Their aim is to support WISERD…

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…

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…

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…

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…