By Anneka Owens | To mark the end of Disability History Month, I have written this blog on my relationship with my disabled identity and my research methods. It maps the road to acceptance and how that has brought my…
Poetry in Practice
By Catrin Edwards-Greaves | Uses for poetry in research: communicating research findings and aiding reflexivity. Hello, I’m the new editor of the Methods blog, and in this post I give some insight into the types of methods that I like…
Online Fieldwork in Conflict Affected Areas
By Louise Ridden | When I started my collaborative ESRC funded PhD in September 2019, I imagined I’d spend many months traveling for my fieldwork. My research topic looks at nonviolent responses to armed conflict, and civilians protecting themselves and…
Could ethnographic methods offer more than interviews when researching curriculum enactment in Wales?
By Rhianna Murphy | Recently I have been reviewing literature for my PhD study on national curriculum enactment in Wales. Whilst there are different methodologies and methods being used amongst studies, there are many research projects that take a case-study…
Home in 27 Exposures: reflections on the use of photo diaries with young migrants living in Swansea
By Jami Abramson | With my mum she was born but she left when she was a baby. She came to Britain but she still has that feeling that it’s her home. You don’t have to have just…
Creative practices of research and practices of welcome for refugees and asylum seekers in rural Wales.
By Sarah Foster | I am researching practices of welcome for refugees and asylum seekers in rural Wales – which often centre on activities such as cooking, walking, dancing, events, and outings. It looks at how people encountering each other…
Semi-Structured Interviews and Participatory Analysis in the Times of Zoom
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.…
You Got Your PhD With THAT? (Part II)
By Claire Förster | Oh, hello, there! You look like I know you from Part I of this post? If not (a) your face is awfully familiar to someone else and (b) you might want to go there. It would…
You Got Your PhD With THAT? (Part I)
By Claire Förster | ‘I know what I want to say, but I just can’t write it down!’ – Look like a familiar trope? Unless you are of the rare breed of (novice) researchers, who just happens to be an…
Using Performance in Research
By Aled Mark Singleton | This blog article outlines the use of performance – namely public walks and small dramatic interventions – as part of research methodology and practice. This article is supported with links to a short video made…
XML mark-up: an annotation tool for discourse analysis
By Katharine Kavanagh | Working recently on a critical discourse analysis project that required annotation of sentencing remarks from UK judges, our team were introduced to the practice of XML mark-up. Manual XML coding was used as a way of recording…
In Defence of Pragmatism: Less a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ and more a ‘Community Chest’
By Alexander Jones | For myself, undertaking a ‘Research Methods’ MSc was my earliest introduction to the ontologies and epistemologies we hold as individuals and researchers. It can be intriguing and exciting learning about the intrinsic views we hold regarding…
The Challenges of Conducting School-Based Research
By Amy Simpson | Prior to being awarded an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Wales Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) Studentship, I worked as a Research Administrator at the Centre for the Development and Evaluation of Complex Interventions for Public…
Including the temporal elements of experiences
By Laura Shobiye | Capturing the temporal elements of individuals’ experiences – that’s something I am setting out to do. I really hope I can achieve it! I am a first year PhD student and this blog post piece is…
Measuring social class: is a multi-dimensional approach needed?
By Ross Goldstone | A good place to start this would be through posing a question: If an upper-class individual (defined economically) loses their job, do they then cease to be upper-class and become working-class or a member of the…
Freedom of Information Requests as a Tool for Social Science Research
By Jennie Mack | Following the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulations earlier this year, we are now more aware than ever of the proliferation of information produced through every day interactions, the nature of its storage and our…