By Geena Whiteman | In the midst of the first COVID19 lockdown, I accepted an offer to move across the border to start my ESRC funded 1+3 PhD programme, exploring youth entrepreneurship in the Western Balkans. This came off the…
“Been there, run that!”: Reflecting on the pandemic
By Martyn Evans | I’m writing this fresh from a crisp Winter jog near Pontyclun. I moved to the area recently and, not knowing many places to explore, tried a run that I’d seen others complete on a well-known activity…
Creative Solutions: Using creative activities to facilitate online focus groups during the pandemic.
By Catrin Edwards-Greaves | In this blog, I recount my experiences of conducting online focus groups with young women as part of my Social Science Research Methods MSc dissertation research investigating relationships between Welsh Government education policy and experiences of…
Stigma and Research Design: Promoting the Participant’s Voice in Qualitative Research on Stigmatised Matters
By Danielle O’Shea | With the value of lived experience being realised in qualitative research, promoting the voices of participants was essential to my research (McIntosh and Wright, 2019) as it would not only acknowledge my participants as the real…
A reflection on the use of in-person, telephone and virtual interviews.
By Aimee Morse, Countryside and Community Research Institute | Prior to the coronavirus pandemic I had been planning to carry out in-person interviews with farmers and land managers across England to discuss their experiences of the Countryside Stewardship Facilitation Fund.…
The First Alarm: A Homeless Hostel’s Response to its First Potential Case of COVID-19
By Fiona Long | Ethnographic storytelling uses literary techniques ‘to construct from fieldnotes a narrative that will interest an outside audience’ (Emerson, 2011: 202). The resulting narratives have been praised for creating a ‘more public, engaging, affective, and panoramic sociology’…
How Covid-19 made me think again: digitally recording walking interviews
By Aled Singleton | This blog article explains how the pandemic challenged the foundations of the work which underpins my PhD research, and how there could be some useful new digital opportunities for researching biographical accounts of the past, present…
Methodological Plan vs Pandemic Reality
By Laura Shobiye | Well, a lot has happened since I first wrote a piece of temporal data and longitudinal research for this blog in November 2018! At the time, I planned to write some updates on my progress along the way.…