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In this article, we report on a follow-up session that was organised to share findings with children about a participatory research project they had been involved in a few months earlier. This was motivated by the ethical concern that it is the children’s right to be informed about the results of the research. In the process of reflecting on the research project, however, the children diverted the researcher’s focus onto aspects of the research that mattered to them. Rather than discussing the results and the benefits of the research, the children were keen to discuss issues of representation, questioning the researcher about pseudonyms, transcribing and their role and presence in the dissertation. The follow-up session opened up a transformational space where both the child participants and the adult researchers gained new understandings about research processes and relationships. We argue that such retrospective reflection can be a beneficial tool to explore children’s post hoc interpretations about the research, while developing researcher reflexivity.

We used participant-produced photography to investigate everyday commuting practices in Cambridge, UK. Photovoice served as an observational method for producing ethnographically rich data. A total of 19 participants produced over 500 photos about their journeys to and from work and took part in photo-elicitation interviews. Three themes emerged. First, many images depicted ‘well-being’ in commuting, for example, beautiful landscapes. Second, during elicitation interviews, participants described positive images that they intended but failed to capture in photos. Third, those participants who did not depict well-being described a lack of choice in their commuting, while those who acknowledged well-being seemed to do so in order to make practices of commuting meaningful and habitable. While our interpretations of photos of well-being could be subject to a methodological fallacy relating to a preference for positive over negative images in lay photography, we nonetheless suggest that the rich visual and oral narratives indicate a ‘real’ experience, albeit elicited through the photovoice.

This paper examines how sexual harassment is often mediated through the making of imagined complicities that are constructed to imply that an alliance/compliance underpins the relationship and ‘justifies’ the harassment. It is concerned with how the making and doing of intimacies engages with broader hierarchical structures of power, including structures of inequality. Fieldwork is viewed as a site in which the politics of intimacy exposes normative expectations and structures of inequality. Specifically, the discussion exposes how processes of Othering are mobilised by participants as a means to cultivate imagined complicities but expose discrimination. The paper calls for a reappraisal of the focus placed on building rapport and/or a sense of familiarity in qualitative research to take account of multiple forms of intimacies and risks they can entail. This is increasingly prescient in light of the renewed emphasis on participatory methods and co-production which entail closer working relationships.

Negotiating the relationships influenced by a combination of identity markers during fieldwork is an important aspect of qualitative data co-creation. Based on ethnographic research with the canal boating and enthusiast communities in the UK, this paper focuses on the mundane power dynamics and hierarchies in research situations. The paper discusses the role of humour in negotiating the interpersonal dynamics and argues for the consideration of power (im)balances in the field beyond assumptions of the researcher as definitely the advantaged side. Joking plays an important role and is used by both research participants and researchers to level the researcher–participant hierarchies as well as to reproduce and reaffirm them. This takes place on a conceptual continuum: first, in terms of their relative rigidity, whereby certain norms, opinions or value systems are reinforced; and secondly, flexibility, whereby the notions about norms and preconceived ideas might shift during the research encounter.

This paper experiments with the use of literary analysis for the interpretation of participants’ writing. The dataset comprises 56 ‘Reports’ in response to a 2019 Mass Observation Directive. Mass Observation is a British archive. Its aim is to record everyday life through correspondents’ responses to thrice-yearly Directives. The paper contributes to lyrical sociology with its development of ‘textural’ analysis. The 2019 Directive asked volunteers to submit reports on what was on their mantelpieces and also about their treasured objects. I found this writing highly allusive of two literary works: Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia, and the ‘Catalogue of Ships’ in Homer's ancient Greek epic poem, the Iliad. This led me not only to review the earlier reports but also to consider how literature can enrich the interpretation of participants’ writing. In conclusion, I argue that following up allusive ‘hunches’ can result in fruitful literary analysis, as a ‘textural’ approach to sociological method.

Research that ‘grows apart’ from its original design and proposal is not uncommon, especially when involving participatory and creative methods. However, the disconnect between research intentions and research realization is seldom probed for the insights offered; this paper addresses this gap. Taking up the conceptual lens of research imaginaries, this paper dives into the tensions and discoveries experienced in between the design and the practice of a multi-site participatory research project. The study involved two groups of young people, in two cities in two countries, with a focus on digital lives. In a commitment to collaboration with artists, senior researchers, research assistants, and young people in community spaces, a complex project emerged. This paper describes the tensions and possibilities of an emergent methodology and in doing so argues for increased attention to the movement of research designs; rather than the adherence to them.

Debates on positionality and partisanship in the research process are long-standing, complex and often highly contentious. Engaging with, and contributing to, both these key debates, this paper introduces the concept of victim-as-researcher. This draws from the author’s experiences of undertaking research in Trinidad and Tobago with a group of offenders who had committed similar offences to that which the researcher was herself a victim. There is a paucity of literature which speaks to the experiences of victims of serious, violent crime who subsequently engage in qualitative research with offenders who have been convicted of offences similar to the ones experienced by the researcher and which, therefore, can elicit trauma whilst in the field and through analysis. This paper aims to extend the methodological literature on positionality and victimology by foregrounding the victim-as-researcher as an important category in reflexive sociological and criminological research.

This paper highlights a methodological vagueness within the existing qualitative research interview literature related to reflecting where interviews takes place. The aim is to interrogate how the use of the concept of emplaced participation can account for the multisensory constitution of place within interviews as well as how the place can provide an opportunity to generate knowledge about participants’ everyday practices. Casey’s understanding of place as a gathering and Pink’s perspectives on emplaced participation provide a sensitive epistemological approach that can be applied by researchers outside the field of ethnography. Based on empirical ethnographic material from fieldwork in Denmark, this paper makes a novel contribution to how researchers can use sensory and emplaced experience before and during an interview. We argue that, if we cease taking emplaced dimensions for granted, new methodological techniques can be developed, which, in turn, can lead to new types of knowledge of practice.

This paper, coauthored by mother and son (aged 10 at the time of writing, 12 at time of revisions), reports on the collaborative research experience during a 2.5-year-long autoethnographic study, which focused on bringing back the family heritage language after a 2-year break. Through a joint research diary, we regularly and rigorously chronicled both language-related conversations and our emotions linked to the process of bringing back the heritage language. Frustration, guilt, joy, exasperation, and pride were jointly discussed via what we call an un/familiar space. This paper explores the evolution of this space, linking it to Bhabha’s third space theory and Gadamer’s fusion of horizons. We present the un/familiar space both as an epistemological stance and as a methodological tool for intergenerational autoethnography, enabling both parents and children to engage with each other in a more neutral space, deliberately removed from traditional family roles. Further, we critically engage with the role of children as co-creators of knowledge within this space, contributing longitudinal data of co-construction and critical reflection from two generations to the research community.

Showcasing plays a fundamental role in arts education programmes. This paper presents an approach to research scenarios which explore ‘event-centred’ projects. Drawing on arts-based methodologies and research projects, this approach could be extended to the study of seasonal rituals, festivals and other types of organisational settings in which creative work culminates in some type of public display. This paper defines the key features of this method, which draw on Paul Willis’ concept of ‘grounded aesthetics’ and Sarah Pink’s work on the sensorial and embodied experience. I discuss the experimentation with various digital media and documentation strategies which adopt a participatory and collaborative perspective. I focus on how the sensorial, multimodal and collaborative approaches to ethnography are used within event-centred research projects which complement more ‘traditional’ ethnographic approaches. Finally, this paper offers a methodological contribution regarding how to unpack the ‘grounded aesthetics’ of specific contexts and communities.

WhatsApp’s ubiquity in many people’s everyday lives points at new possibilities for conducting online and mobile focus groups. Yet, research on the benefits and potential pitfalls of this is negligible. This paper offers new empirical insights from using the method as part of a digital ethnography with young activists in Western Kenya. The presence of WhatsApp in participants’ everyday lives offers a context with high ecological validity. The paper suggests that this opens up new options for designing online focus groups, transcending the traditional categorisation between synchronous and asynchronous interactions and some limitations of both approaches. WhatsApp also offers opportunities for creating more inclusive group discussions. Using discourse analysis of the WhatsApp focus group, the paper also finds that this familiarity and inclusivity affords the potential for group deliberation, which can be particularly valuable in participatory research.

This paper draws upon research projects in which efforts have been made to find ways of listening to young children’s voices in early years contexts. This listening, namely in the mosaic approach, helps us to see how children make sense of their world, and adopt our planning and ‘being with’ young children. After setting the context of early years pedagogy and ideology of mosaic approach, this paper focuses on the researcher’s journey to turn her gaze inward before making any claims about her engagement with and listening to young children. Since this approach purposely leaves unanswered the question what kind of data is going to be collected, researchers have to decide what data is in the course of a research project, through their engagement with children. We argue for befriending uncertainty and dilemmatic thinking as it provides us with a different way of seeing, knowing and listening the hard to know. Through writing about phronêsis, this paper focuses on the process of decision-making and judgements that researchers undertake. The final argument calls for attentiveness and aims to acknowledge practical judgements as a fundamental part of researching early years.

Funding: CREW: Scotland's centre of expertise for waters; the Scottish Government's Strategic Research Programme (2016-2021). This project employed community researchers as a means of improving community engagement around their Private Water Supplies (PWS) in rural Scotland. In this paper, we reflect on working with community researchers in terms of the benefits and challenges of the approach for future rural research that seeks to improve community engagement. The paper (1) critiques the involvement of community researchers for rural community engagement, drawing on the experiences in this project and (2) provides suggestions for good practice for working with community researchers in rural communities’ research. We offer some context in terms of the role of community members in research, the importance of PWS, our approach to community researchers, followed by the methodological approach and findings and our conclusions to highlight that community researchers can be beneficial for enhancing community engagement, employability, and social capital. Future community researcher approaches need to be fully funded to ensure core researchers can fulfil their duty of care, which should not stop when data collection is finished. Community researchers need to be supported in two main ways: as continuing faces of the project after the official project end date and to transfer their newly acquired skills to future employment opportunities Publisher PDF

This methodological paper considers how movement may be captured and expressed in qualitative data. Beginning with a history of movement as it has been represented in empirical studies, this paper posits that movement has been undertheorized in qualitative research (via video and photograph); theorizes movement under the Deleuzo–Bergsonian concept of duration; and wonders how movement as a kind of ‘dynamic unity’ might be expressed as visual data. Using photographs collected from a troupe of fire-manipulating circus performers, this study suggests the use of long-exposure camera technology as one practical means of thinking about movement (as duration) in qualitative research.

This paper contributes to the literature on ethics in Participatory Research by looking at the Researcher-in-Residence model and its application within health services research in three East London boroughs. The Researcher-in-Residence is embedded in the organisation to enable knowledge mobilisation and knowledge coproduction. Whereas negotiation of different types of expertise to coproduce evidence might raise issues of power differentials, the embedded nature of the role also requires careful negotiating of relationships. As the researcher is immersed in the context under evaluation, the boundaries between the researcher and the participants’ everyday working life can become blurred. The paper explores these ethical issues and suggests that, whereas the requirements of ethics committees, based on an ethics of principle, at times fail to offer appropriate guidelines for this methodological approach, an ethics of care based on relationships can offer a complementary framework to address some of the thorny challenges that emerge from everyday practice in participatory research.

In this paper, the authors describe a way of doing phenomenology using exemplars drawn from a doctoral study of Australian nurses’ lived experiences following a disaster. Phenomenology is concerned with the essence of things as they are appearing in the conscious awareness of the first person. This paper emphasises a way of doing phenomenology based on maintaining orientation to the uniqueness of the ‘thingness’ of the phenomena being uncovered. While there is no one way to do phenomenology, this paper shows a way of doing phenomenology from obtaining individual narrative and moving to an intersubjective lived-experience description.

A more considered sense of the embodied nature of encounter is called for in the scholarship of ethnography. This paper argues for an ethnographic practice that accordingly moves beyond simplistic recounts of ‘highly personalised styles and their self-absorbed mandates’ (Van Maanen, 2011: 73), to more fully position an understanding of the ethnographer’s Self as an also encountered ‘site’. Taking cues from Heideggar’s (2008/1927) formulation of Dasein and the realisation of the Self through the encountered Other, this paper argues that attempts to make sense of the Other in ethnography – ultimately the raison d’etre of ethnographic practice – concomitantly require an accounting-for of the Self. This paper takes aim at the nature of embodiment as central to the experience of encounter, but will argue that this encounter of the Self functions as an aporia: a site of unknowing, but equally, of generative possibility. It is with the effects that embodiment has and the inflections it provides for the ethnography that particular attention is given.

Articulating the complexities of relational wellbeing can be challenging at the best of times, and even more complex during periods of heightened stress and uncertainty. Taking inspiration from feminist materialisms and recent writings on material methods, we explore the potential of object interviews to reveal the material-discursive dimensions of women’s experiences of wellbeing during the pandemic. In this paper we describe our research process conducting object interviews with 38 women living in Aotearoa New Zealand from a range of socio-economic, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds. We explore the potential and challenges of object interviews for surfacing new ways of knowing (theoretically, methodologically, and cross-culturally) wellbeing beyond human-oriented health, medical and social-constructionist models, and towards more multidimensional and relational understandings. This paper offers our reflections and learnings about the process of re-turning object interviews and the potential of such approaches for evoking complex ways of knowing wellbeing during and beyond pandemic times.

The use of vignettes that are based upon fictionalised accounts is well-established in contemporary social science. Vignettes have been used in a variety of ways to contribute to studies with both a quantitative and a qualitative orientation. This paper reflects on two recent qualitative studies which have made innovative use of ‘real-life’ vignettes. In each case, the paper describes some of the unanticipated and overlapping benefits that accrued from their incorporation into the research design and reflects on the advantages that ‘real-life’ vignettes might bring to future research. Drawing on two different research projects, the paper highlights the further potential contribution of ‘real-life’ vignettes to the repertoire of research methods currently available to social scientists.

Conducting research with young participants presents numerous challenges, particularly in terms of representation as the researcher endeavours to listen to children’s voices in order to understand and portray their perspectives accurately. Since the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of a Child established children have the right to express their views and have these taken seriously in matters that affect them, researchers have developed a variety of multimodal methods to capture the children’s perspectives. The aim of this paper is to describe an innovative methodological approach to recording ethnographic observations of young children (aged four to six) through a visual mode: the cartoon. The article describes the methodology of a specific research project that explored young children’s communicative practices in a super-diverse environment. Adopting a flexible approach to research and putting children’s suggestions into practice led to the co-production cartoons that used the participants’ self-portraits to visually portray the researcher’s written observations of the children. The paper presents vignettes, evidencing how the use of self-portraits meant the cartoons were more engaging, held greater personal significance and opened up spaces for dialogue, leading the researcher to uncover deeper insights. This has important implications for any research that endeavours to listen to the participants’ perspectives, but where verbal or written forms of communication are impeded.

Within qualitative research, much can be learned from the influence of researcher positionality on the research process. Reflecting upon ethnographic fieldwork undertaken for a doctoral study, this paper explores how researcher positionality not only shapes research motivations but also situates the researcher and the ‘researched’, impacting how data is created and interpreted. There is a long history of engaging with positionality in qualitative research, however, oftentimes this engagement is purely descriptive, providing a ‘shopping list’ of characteristics and stating if these are shared or not with participants. It is important for engagement with reflexivity to go beyond providing a ‘shopping list’ of positionality statements to develop deeper discussions about the fluidity of positionality across the research process. Using the previously established concept of ‘kitchen table reflexivity’, I reflect on how talk allows researchers to outline shifts and adaptability in positionality as research progresses. I expand this concept to argue that kitchen table reflexivity can occur in conversations during fieldwork with participants, utilising a range of in/visible tools at the researcher’s disposal. For example, the spaces between fieldwork encounters, the ‘waiting field’, is often where observations and informal discussions with participants take place. Using fieldnotes and interview data, this paper outlines how positionality fluctuates and interweaves with the theoretical, methodological, and analytical approach taken. The paper concludes by restating the importance of meaningful engagement with positionality throughout qualitative research, in order to avoid static and hollow positionality statements.

Fieldwork encounters are not only contingent to biographical subjectivities, but are mediated by a\ud confluence of identity, place and embodiment. This paper offers reflexive accounts of researchers\ud with various socio-cultural and disciplinary backgrounds, who collaborated as a team to examine\ud the varied funerary experiences and needs of established minorities and recent migrants in\ud England and Wales. Focusing on the researchers’ varied personal experiences with death and\ud bereavement and on their performances of minority and majority ethnic and migrant identities, the\ud paper highlights the mediated and embodied nature of fieldwork. It argues that reflection on the various aspects of intersectional researcher identity is necessary for a rigorous fieldwork practice\ud that takes transparency and politics into account. This facilitates a deeper understanding of the\ud positionality of both researchers and interlocutors, and the situated co-production of knowledge.\ud In doing so, the paper illustrates that conducting research with a diverse team of researchers\ud contributes to better understanding the complexity and multifacetedness of social phenomena.

The purpose of this paper is to explain and describe the use of presuppositional interviews as means of the researcher being able to expose their own, often unknown, assumptions about the phenomena of interest. Within this, we provide a philosophical and practical account for the development and use of a presuppositional interview from an insider perspective to expose insights which influence researcher reflexivity and directly impact on the research process. Author A’s hermeneutic phenomenological study seeks to gain insights into the lived experience of children learning mathematics in outdoor environments, such as forests and woodland. The paper describes how the reflexive method of presuppositional interviewing helped him to understand more about his research position and find a clearing in his ‘Being in the Wood.’ A template for a presupposition interview schedule is presented.

This paper explores the possibilities of drawing as a method of researching social representations. The theory of social representations focuses on studying the forms, contents, and functions of socially shared common knowledge. In this paper, we (1) present the central premises of social representations theory, (2) elaborate drawing as a visual research method, and (3) synthesize how the drawing method may promote and diversify our understanding of social representations. We suggest that the drawing method is especially fruitful in the analysis of objectification process (how something abstract is made tangible); cognitive polyphasia (the idea of the simultaneous existence of diverse and contradicting social representations); and the different levels of analysis in which social representations become observable: ontogenesis (individual level), microgenesis (social interaction level), and sociogenesis (societal level). Through these insights, this paper advances the current understanding of the drawing method in qualitative social representations research.

In the era of visual media, cities, and society are represented, experienced, and interpreted through images. The need for interdisciplinary visual approaches, therefore, is indisputable. By focusing on cinema, this paper aims to develop a conceptual, methodological framework through which theory helps a broad range of researchers in social sciences, humanities, and arts interpret the represented phenomenon. Based on Peirce’s model of signs, the framework provides the basis for a dynamic interpretation of the city and society. This paper shows that Peircean cinesemiotics takes advantage of theory in three ways: First, as the basis that provides scholars with clues necessary for identifying eligible “image-signs”; second, as the guiding framework that helps them reach a final interpretation; third, as ideas are being criticized from visual perspectives. As an example of its application, using Jane Jacobs’ “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” the final part of the paper applies Peircean cinesemiotics to an image-sign from Death Wish (2018) and interprets it as the representation of safety/crime in a neighborhood.

The Repeat Question Diary method involves research participants audio-recording many answers to a single question. This article investigates some of the features of the method that are relevant to the study of mobile practices. Particularly, the method encourages participant reflection and the paper argues that this can facilitate the study of mobile practices through enabling participants to notice and analyse previously taken-for-granted, pre-conscious, or corporeal aspects of their practices. The paper also explores the use of audio-recording in diary research and argues that audio-diaries can facilitate participant expression, particularly of emotions, and can avoid the stifling effects of self-editing in written diaries.

Work on epistemics in conversation analysis (CA) has demonstrated how speakers attend closely to the knowledge claims they and others make and how this shapes interaction. This paper uses work on epistemics in CA to explore how interviewers and interviewees orient to knowledge claims involving the asking and answering of questions. Since research participants are recruited to represent a category identified by the researcher, interviewees are assumed to have greater knowledge relative to the research topic as compared to interviewers, who typically work to demonstrate that they are eager learners about others’ experiences, perceptions and beliefs and so forth. This paper examines sequences from research interviews to focus on the fine-grained work involved in asking questions and making knowledge claims within interviews. Epistemics provides a powerful tool to examine how speakers’ orientations to others’ knowledge claims is central to the interactional work of conducting interviews.

Saturation of data has been acknowledged by many social scientists as evidence of rigor in qualitative research. Though there is a consensus about its definition and usefulness in qualitative research, the methods for achieving saturation are scarce while the social scientists who mention data saturation in their research methodologies do not adequately describe how this is achieved. This paper describes a new method for achieving saturation in studies that use interviews. The method is called Comparative Method for Themes Saturation (CoMeTS). CoMeTS is comparative in two ways. First, all themes from all interviews are compared with each other. Second, the sequence of interviews is reordered multiple times in order to check saturation again. This is because the sequence of interviews during the check makes saturation vary and, therefore, reordering helps confirming saturation. This paper concludes that CoMeTS is a simple, comparative and holistic method for achieving saturation and that it can be used in complicated qualitative studies.

The paper is a discussion of my attempt to move beyond familiarity by using ethnomethodology – and the emotional impact of doing so; namely, the feeling of having a ‘dirty secret’. As a social work group member interviewing social workers, the process of fieldwork was all too familiar. However, during transcription and analysis, what I had considered to be ‘business as usual’ was revealed as something more complex. The paper describes how the ethnomethodological notions of being a member, the unique adequacy requirement of methods, and breaching worked to make the familiar strange and became key to my understanding.

Conducting research in the rapidly evolving fields constituting the digital social sciences raises challenging ethical and technical issues, especially when the subject matter includes activities of stigmatised populations. Our study of a dark-web drug-use community provides a case example of ‘how to’ conduct studies in digital environments where sensitive and illicit activities are discussed. In this paper we present the workflow from our digital ethnography and consider the consequences of particular choices of action upon knowledge production. Key considerations that our workflow responded to include adapting to volatile field-sites, researcher safety in digital environments, data security and encryption, and ethical-legal challenges. We anticipate that this workflow may assist other researchers to emulate, test and adapt our approach to the diverse range of illicit studies online. In this paper we argue that active engagement with stigmatised communities through multi-sited digital ethnography can complement and augment the findings of digital trace analyses.

This paper focuses on the methodological challenges of ‘embodying’ qualitative research. While a substantial literature exists on theoretical aspects of the ‘turn to bodies’, there is little work which has grappled with its methodological implications. This article provides a brief overview and critique of approaches to embodied qualitative methodologies developed in the social sciences over the last decade. The paper also articulates theoretical-methodological strategies that could be useful in the effort to develop ‘embodied methodologies’. The theoretical-methodological strategies outlined include: theorising the embodied subject, problematizing transcription and using poetic representational and methodological devices. These strategies are discussed in relation to a research project exploring women’s narratives of childbirth and shows their use in tracing and representing the sensual body in qualitative analysis.

Theorizing about how culture influences planned group formation and interaction can be tested through using focus groups as a research method. This article is not about the Omani population, but in higher education, it is useful to depict evaluative research as being cosmopolitan in its approach. Data obtained from eleven focus groups conducted in Oman with nurses assisted the authors of this paper to embrace what it means to respect another culture and enable understanding of that culture. The premise about reflexive methods is to promote the voices of the research team and by reporting a team approach a broader voice can be heard. This paper aims to inform an international audience that taking a traditional perspective when using focus groups can be stereotyped by cultural assumptions. Such stereotypical assumptions did not represent the reality of the design; the study was structured to be culturally sensitive and fit for purpose. Such assumptions can be dismissed if participants are given a choice within the study.

This paper discusses telephone interviewing as a qualitative research method and defines qualitative telephone interviews as participant-centered. In a research project which consisted of internet based recruitment, emails sent to set up interviews and an analysis of 39 qualitative interviews conducted over telephone, I contend that being interviewed over the phone may result in more honest data as people have become more accustomed to ‘virtual’ communication, serving to benefit to both the participant and researcher. By merging feminist research methodology with traditional forms of semi-structured interviewing, data collected over the phone can be used when dealing with traumatic or sensitive topics and can result in rich data. Thus, this paper contributes to an ever-evolving conversation regarding the utility of telephone interviewing.

Qualitative researchers are compelled to use their personal judgements before, during and after interviews, particularly when their interview subjects are drawn from vulnerable groups. This paper discusses the dilemmas qualitative researchers encounter when collecting data that is ethically ‘sensitive’; and situates the discussion in the realm of the Australian Occupational Health & Safety (OH&S) legislative requirement of ‘duty of care’ using the Rapidly Degenerative Neurological Diseases Pilot Program in Western Australia as the case example. The paper is focussed upon the practicalities and ethical concerns of the researchers conducting qualitative data collections. The discussion seeks to provide practical reflections on lessons learned and suggestions for self-care practice for researchers in the field and calls for policies that instruct and protect them.

This article reviews claims for methodological innovation in qualitative research. It comprises a review of 57 papers published between 2000–9 in which claims to innovation in qualitative methods have been made. These papers encompass creative methods, narrative methods, mixed methods, online/e-research methods, focus groups and software tools. The majority of claims of innovation are made for new methods or designs, with the remainder claiming adaptations or adoption of existing methodological innovations. However, the evidence provided of wholly new methodologies or designs was limited, and in several papers such claims turned out to relate either to adaptations to existing methods, or to the transfer and adaptation of methods from other disciplines, primarily from arts and humanities. We argue that over-claiming innovation in the sense of the development of a wholly new methodology or design has a number of important implications that are potentially detrimental to qualitative social science.

ABSTRACT Although there is increasing demand for syntheses of qualitative research, little is known about papers that aim to report such syntheses. We searched for published reports of attempts to conduct syntheses of qualitative research in health and healthcare. Papers were included if they were published between 1988 and 2004, in the English language, and in a peer-reviewed journal. We identified a modest body of literature (42 papers) reporting syntheses of qualitative research in health and healthcare. We extracted data on the topic of the paper and on reported methods for searching, appraisal, and synthesis. Some papers reported purposive attempts to innovate with, and to adapt, methods for synthesis. Many papers lack explicitness about methods for searching, appraisal, and synthesis, and there is little evidence of emerging consensus on many issues. There was also some evidence of possibly inappropriate use of some techniques. We conclude that continued methodological progress and improved reporting are required.

During the last decade resistance against environmental destruction has spread throughout much of the developed world. Over this period Environmental Direct Action (EDA) has evolved into an inventive and dynamic movement that not only rallies against specific environmental damages, but also the broader political and economic systems that are perceived to facilitate them. With the growth of Environmental Direct Action there has been a concomitant increase in the number wishing to understand and explain the phenomenon. This expansion of academic interest raises two questions: (1) Are conventional academic epistemologies suitable to understand and explain the motivations of and challenges posed by EDA?, and (2) Do the power relations inherent within such approaches facilitate or preclude our opportunities to make sense of this resistance movement? This paper uses experience gained from my own empirical work on EDA in the UK to explore these issues. Beginning with what Soja terms the ‘Secondspace’ approach to social science research, it will focus on the problems posed by issues of positionality and power relations for the study of EDA. The paper will go on to illustrate that, although entailing a number of problems, a ‘Thirdspace’ approach offers some solutions that can secure important insights into this political practice.

In a study on children, families and food messages in Victoria, Australia, we utilised a multi-methods approach that included visual data produced by primary-school aged children. Working with 50 families, we provided each child investigator with an iPad for 3–4 days and invited them to photograph family food events important to them. The analysis of visual data alongside child and family interviews revealed the diverse meaning-making practices children draw on to understand food practices at home and school. These research practices aspired to locate the researchers and children as co-creators. In this paper, we reflect on the challenges and (dis)comfort we faced as researchers as the implications of co-creation emerged and we engaged with children’s voices, photos and families inside their homes. The multi-methods approach supported a comprehensive and rich engagement with commensality and pleasure in food practices at home for children, but illuminated the complex emotional and intellectual terrain of such research practices.

This study discusses the methodological component of a research project with Sudanese musicians and their associated activist groups. The methodology included song-writing and, as such, is an example of collaborative creative research practice. Proponents of collaborative creative practice argue that the combination of aesthetic methods with ethnographic and participatory research methods brings both epistemological and ethical dividends. This paper considers whether these alleged epistemological and ethical advantages bore out in this research project. While confirming some benefits, my study also shows evidence of underlying tensions between aesthetic ‘micro-methods’ and ethnographic and participatory traditions of knowledge production. In relation to the alleged epistemological dividends, I argue that autoethnographic embedding in collaborative creative practice is alone insufficient. It requires a theoretical framework which theorises the relationship between one player’s musical experience and another’s. Only with this, can the sensory experiences of the researcher be used to inform analysis of participant observations and interviews. The autoethnographic experiences of the researcher are not findings in themselves. In relation to the ethical dividends, unlike other arts-based research, I found that the aesthetic micro-methods in this study did not naturally lend themselves to participant empowerment. The pursuit of aesthetic goals has its own division of labour which can lead to the deprioritisation of self-expression and co-learning which constitute the primary aims of classical participatory research. Overall, collaborative creative practice did enhance this research project but there are important caveats. To reflect these, I aruge that creative collaboration should not be considered as a simple sub-set of either ethnographic or participatory research but as a method in its own right.

This paper reflects on the value of diary methods in the context of a qualitative, longitudinal narrative inquiry exploring the higher education decision-making of further education students in England. Event-based diaries were used alongside interviews and focus groups over a 14-month period to gain in-depth insights into the reasons and influences informing their decision-making trajectories. I explore the challenges, successful approaches and advantages of employing diary methods with young people in this context. Challenges consisted of maintaining participant engagement, which was overcome by combining methods and incorporating a reactive co-participatory element. Yet, a number of advantages emerged from participants' engagement with diary keeping which enhanced the richness of the data; this inspired deeper reflections on decision-making and influences and provided a private space for participants to disclose personal difficulties that could not be obtained via interviews.

This paper points out some problematic aspects of qualitative research based on interviews and uses examples from mental health. The narrative approach is explored while inquiring if the reality of life here is forced into the formula of a chronological story. The hermeneutic approach, in general, is also examined, and we ask if the reality of life in this scenario becomes caught up in a web of interpretations. Inspired by ideas from Bakhtin and phenomenology, we argue for interview-based research that stays with unresolvedness and constantly question the web of interpretations and narratives that determine our experiences. This also chimes with certain dialogical practices in mental health in which tolerance of uncertainty is the guiding principle. Concludingly, we suggest that interview-based research could be a practice of ‘un-resolving’ in which researchers, together with the participants, look for cracks, contradictions, and complexities to prevent the qualitative fallacies of well-organized meanings and well-composed stories.

The staccato rhythms of experiential time remain obscured in much of the literature on participatory research, where time is treated as a reassuring constant – a backdrop for human activity. This article addresses the discordances between lived temporalities and existing theorisations of participatory methodologies. It takes participatory research with lone child migrants as a particularly rich case to think with, given the proliferation of contradictory and often punitive applications of time these young people encounter in their interactions with migration and welfare regimes. The core argument developed is that unless temporality is given due theoretical and methodological attention, aims of contesting and unsettling inequities through participatory research will have limited success and can wind up reproducing exclusions and oppressions. In response to these critiques, the paper temporalizes participatory research through three reconstructions: working with and against time, de-centring shared time and collectivising the time of participatory research.

Side comments and conversations in focus groups can pose challenges for facilitators. Rather than seeing side comments as problematic behavior or “failed” data, we argue that they can add to and deepen analyses. Drawing on focus group data with grade nine students from a study on early work, in this methodological paper we discuss three patterns. First, side comments have highlighted where participants required clarification, and illustrated their views and questions about the research process. Second, side comments added new data to our analysis, including personal reflections, connections to others’ comments, and information about participants’ uncertainties about the research topics. Third, these comments offered insight into peer relations and dynamics, including participants’ reflections on age, and how they deployed gender relations in their discussions. Provided that their use fits within established ethical protocols, we argue that there is a place for attention to side comments, especially in focus group research with young people where adult-teen hierarchies and peer dynamics might lead young people to engage more with peers than directly respond to researchers’ questions.

Digital maps have been taken up as a productive tool in both activism and academic research. However, there has been less consideration of their use as a research method in qualitative social sciences research. This paper aims to contribute towards scholarship on qualitative research by providing a critical reflection on the use of digital mapping as a research method in a feminist research project on street-based harassment in Australia. Drawing on practices of reflexivity, as well as comments made by participants across 46 qualitative interviews, I consider how digital mapping can be used to facilitate feminist research, arguing that it represents a generative instrument which lends itself to the development of in-depth insights from participants. Yet, mapping also delimits the epistemological possibilities of qualitative research, and I consider how this method simultaneously constrains what can be known about street harassment.

This paper lies at the intersection of discussions surrounding digitally mediated research methods and transnational research projects. It contributes to the current methodological debate surrounding online interviewing by focusing on tensions and affordances involved in Skype-to-phone interviewing in a transnational research context. While the Skype-to-phone facility does indeed increase further access to global participants, complex power hierarchies and ethical concerns continue to exist in relation to technological access/infrastructure, research governance regimes in different places and interpersonal research relations. We, therefore, propose that online researchers involved in transnational research projects using Skype methods move towards consideration of multiple competing constituencies and diverse social and spatial connectivities and power hierarchies in which they are researching. These social differences and spatial registers are not swept away through research conducted in a uniform virtual digital environment; rather transnational researchers must make explicit the multiple place-based contexts of their digitally mediated research, as they shape the research process in distinct ways. Thus, specific consideration must be given to ethical concerns that emanate from transnational online research.

Words and stories have the power to resonate with people. Composite narratives can be constructed using multiple participant accounts, representing their experiences while also capturing the properties and categories of qualitative research findings. The ability of composite narratives to represent the multiple facets of theory construction through a singular narrative point-of-view is unique and provides a concise and credible method to present research findings. This paper explains how composite narratives can be constructed to present the research data that findings are built upon through an illustrative example of the process. The example of a composite narrative presented in this article is one of a larger set from a grounded theory study about a substantive group of Australian students’ experiences of their interactions in the classroom that communicate their teachers’ expectations of them. Narratives have the power to affect change in society by enhancing the transferability of research findings, presenting research findings with impact because they are engaging and memorable for readers. Qualitative researchers who are interested in composing composite narratives to reflect multiple participants’ different experiences, through interview data, will benefit from the justification and example of the technique, which provides a model for future research.

This paper explores a form of sensuous methodology known as smellwalks. Smellwalks are a method which require a reorientation of the senses to temporarily emphasize the information received from the nose. During a smellwalk, the researcher employs an active form of smelling to examine their environment that diverges from normal smell perception. In this research, smellwalks are deployed to investigate the experience of lockdown in a suburban town in Aotearoa-New Zealand. Six solo walks were undertaken, three during lockdown and three out of it, to compare the presence and absence of smells during these periods. In attuning to the invisible, intangible, mundane, and small details of life via smell, smellwalks opened opportunities for new embodied and material knowledge about lockdown experience. It is argued that smellwalks offer a sensory and embodied method with the capacity to attend to more than vision and representation.

This article discusses methodological adaptations to participatory methods for reflexive environmental management. Reflexive approaches to research methods as process, this article contends, can elucidate social dynamics that standard sampling frames and rote procedures may elide. This argument is supported through a discussion of key insights from scholarship about participatory research methods, as well as auto-reflections on methodical adaptations undertaken while conducting photovoice research on environmental management in peri-urban villages of Southwest China. Reflexive adaptations to participatory methods discussed in this paper include ethnographic attention to forms of refusal, suspended participation, and individual interviews with and without visual aids. These methodological adaptations highlight relations of power between researchers and participants, as well as amongst participants. They also highlight diverse social needs and uneven environmental management processes. Although reflexive approaches to participatory methods are key to producing more widely representational findings and socially just sustainability practices, they are not a panacea for universal inclusivity. Reflexive methodological adaptations have their own limitations and introduce new power relations between participants and researchers. The article concludes with a discussion of how reflexive methodological adaptations bear on research praxis. In particular, the conclusion highlights how reflexive adaptations to research methods are crucial to socially just environmental management and sustainability practices.

This paper explores the methodological possibilities of listening to more-than-human sounds as an entry point to critical analysis. Through attending to the sound of a leafblower as it resonates across a university campus, this article draws lines between the resonances of the leafblower, higher education, and white supremacy to explore how sounds become embedded in bodies and spaces. In addition, this article offers a methodology of listening as a process of attunement that provokes readings beyond what is immediately heard, seen, or felt. To listen to the sound of the leafblower and what it does, how it resonates is to attune to how that sound works, how it operates in the production and discourses of place. In other words, this article wonders how listening, as a methodological practice, provokes critical questions about place and space, and how sound (and particularly nonhuman or more than human sounds) functions in qualitative methodology.