Methods

Researching children's lives ethically in order to inform critical debates around child protection, and getting a better understanding of what it's like to research children in a digital age has been the thrust of the NCRM-funded Face to Face project at the University of Sussex. The project, which aims to develop methodological tools for researching the temporal rhythms of children's everyday lives was featured at the ESRC Research Methods Festival 2014 as part of a session looking at initiatives supporting methodological innovation in qualitative longitudinal research. Liam Berriman talks to Christine Garrington about the project.

There can be few more emotionally sensitive and challenging research areas than looking at the deaths of children. Following the death of her own young son, social worker Denise Turner decided to investigate parents' experiences of the professional response following the death of a child. Having completed her PhD, she shared her research at the ESRC Research Methods Festival 2014, talking openly about her personal and professional take on the research and the methodological challenges she faced along the way.

When it comes to the commercial world, crowdfunding has become a mainstream means of accessing money for anyone with a great idea. But what about the possibilities when it comes to funding academic research? Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith at UCL have been exploring the benefits of crowdsourcing for information, resources and for funding. He will be sharing his thoughts and ideas with fellow academics and researchers at the ESRC Research Methods Festival.

It has become widely accepted that it is both worthwhile and necessary for researchers from different disciplines to work together. But how to go about this may not always be obvious and there will inevitably be challenges. In the exciting and innovative NCRM-funded MIDAS project, researchers from the worlds of Social Science and the Digital Arts have come together to look at how they might synthesise methods to open up different perspectives, generate imaginative research questions, and create a wider range of research tools, for those looking to understand the complex topic of embodiment and how we interact every day with rapidly developing technologies. Professor Carey Jewitt from the Institute of Education explains more.

Is mixed methods research a turbulent environment and is innovation being stifled by an overly tightly bound concept of what it is? Sharlene Hesse-Biber, professor in the Sociology Department of Boston College thinks so. Professor Hesse-Biber will be giving a Key Lecture at the ESRC Research Methods Festival in July where she will explain her thinking, how she has been reflecting on 20 years of mixed methods teaching and her hopes for the future. In this podcast, she gives a taster of what we can expect.

The NCRM funded project 'Integrating emerging smartphone and genetic initiatives to produce cost-effective, innovative methodology' hopes to produce an unprecedented research tool and data source to transform the ability of social scientists to look at the interaction of hereditary factors, and people's daily environment and behaviour. Dr Alex Kogan from the University of Cambridge explains more about the project in this podcast.

From the challenge of envisioning our own futures to the storytelling skills of Barack Obama, a new book from the Professor Molly Andrews (NOVELLA node) explores how the links between stories and imagination affect the way we live. Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life by Professor Molly Andrews is published by Oxford University Press.

A unique collaboration between two NCRM nodes - Talisman and the Hub is working on new methods for the simulation of 'social networks' in UK cities in order to show how individual people move around and are brought together within different residential and non-residential environments. The aim is to produce a simulation which maps individuals not just by their place of usual residence (as in the Census for example) but traces their movement patterns around the city in small parcels of elapsed time. The research could ultimately have useful applications in a range of areas from flood defence to emergency planning. In this podcast NCRM's Co-Director Professor David Martin explains the background to the project, the opportunities and challenges around using phones and Twitter in the research and talks about some of the innovative ideas being explored by early career researchers using the models created in the project.

Just how many interviews is enough? That is a question that students conducting a piece of qualitative research frequently ask. It is also a big question for early career researchers and established academics when they are designing research projects. Dr Sarah Baker from Middlesex University and Professor Rosalind Edwards from NCRM decided to address this question in an NCRM working paper that has since been downloaded more than 20,000 times. In this podcast Rosalind Edwards from NCRM talks about how they went about answering how many qualitative interviews is enough?

The advent of a wide range of new data sources and digital research methods has created a plethora of opportunities for social science researchers to undertake innovative and impactful research. At the NCRM-funded node TALISMAN, researchers are using new data and technologies to look at a range of geography-related real world issues, with the aim of generating new and powerful methods to help address key policy questions. In this podcast TALISMAN Director Professor Mark Birkin talks about some of the node's work and explains why he wants more researchers to seize the new research opportunities available to them.

In an era in which social life is increasingly played out online, innovative digital research methods are providing new ways of asking questions and generating data. But with exciting new opportunities come a number of complex challenges. In this podcast researchers from the NCRM-funded project Digital Methods as Mainstream Methodologies talk to Christine Garrington about a new network that is trying build capacity in the research community to address the opportunities and challenges that digitally inspired methods present for social research.

From the arguments for and against undercover research to an explosion in interest in online research, these are exciting but challenging time for researchers undertaking qualitative research. Increasing ethical regulation of social research also means it is crucial that researchers understand and engage with ethical issues as they emerge throughout the process of their work. In a new book, What are Qualitative Research Ethics? Dr Rose Wiles from NCRM offers an accessible overview of the field, identifying the key issues that researchers are likely to face, and the everyday ethical dilemmas that researchers encounter. In our latest NCRM podcast Dr Wiles talks to Chris Garrington about ethics and discusses the framework proposed in her book to help researchers deal with those dilemmas.

Should social science researchers embrace social media and, if they do, what are the implications for our methods and practice? Gareth Morrell from NatCen Social Research talks to Chris Garrington about the NCRM-funded network exploring this question.