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As valuable as they might be, observational data are not just informational but can inspire (re)conceptualization and a view to empirical complexity. Following a discussion of ‘sensitizing concepts’, this chapter discusses how observations conducted in ethnographic fieldwork on disability and homelessness contributed to developing ideas that further sensitized our understanding of field material. In illustration, the chapter draws on two studies: my research team’s recent fieldwork on agency and authority in the circumstance of homelessness, and on my work on
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Human service work is performed in many places – hospitals, shelters, households, prisons, schools, clinics – and is characterised by a complex mixture of organising principles, relations and rules. Using ethnographic methods, researchers can investigate these site-specific complexities, providing multi-dimensional and compelling analyses.
Bringing together both theoretical and practical material, this book shows researchers how ethnography can be carried out within human service settings. It provides an invaluable guide on how to apply ethnographic creativeness and offers a more humanistic and context-sensitive approach in the field of health and social care to generating valid knowledge about today’s service work.
This groundbreaking book brings creative writing to social research. Its innovative format includes creatively written contributions by researchers from a range of disciplines, modelling the techniques outlined by the authors. The book is user-friendly and shows readers:
• how to write creatively as a social researcher;
• how creative writing can help researchers to work with participants and generate data;
• how researchers can use creative writing to analyse data and communicate findings.
Inviting beginners and more experienced researchers to explore new ways of writing, this book introduces readers to creatively written research in a variety of formats including plays and poems, videos and comics. It not only gives social researchers permission to write creatively but also shows them how to do so.
Introduction There has been much attention given to the relationship between early life socio-economic disadvantage and poorer health outcomes and disability in population health research. This association has been demonstrated across various objective and subjective measures, in both adults and children ( Nikiéma et al, 2012 ; Nobles et al, 2013 ; Darin-Mattsson et al, 2017 ; Doebler and Glasgow, 2017 ; Kivimäki et al, 2020 ). It is only recently that researchers have begun to focus on the impact on adolescent health, recognising the long
they consider to be more desirable actions. The ‘organizational embeddedness’ of everyday life has rhythms of its own that mediate individual attitudes and sensibilities (compare Gubrium, 1992 ; Gubrium and Holstein, 1993 ). Part II of the book is titled ‘Grasping empirical complexity’. Its chapters seek to grasp an understanding of the complex practices in place that generate inconsistencies and contradictions in the meaning of service provision. Bracketed is the assumption that terms of reference such as homelessness, disability and dementia and their
collected interview and journal data from 16 people who had gone through open-heart surgery, and initial analysis highlighted the requirement for a more humanistic, patient-focused approach to healthcare. She put together a cross- disciplinary research team for further analysis which included five people: 1. an associate professor, poet, nurse, and arts-based researcher (Lapum herself); 2. a design strategist and multi-disciplinary artist; 3. a researcher and disability activist; 4. a cardiovascular surgeon and professor; 5. an assistant professor in fashion. The team
corporate academia by Kay Inckle6 Kay Inckle is a recovering academic. By her own account, she misspent much of her adulthood in higher education pursuing the naive belief that education was a vehicle for critical and creative practice which promoted social justice. Instead she found that the white, ableist patriarchy was alive and well and reproducing ever more inequality and elitism. In this piece she uses creative writing to explore the overt and insidious ways in which disability discrimination is enacted in universities and how higher education remains a
their research. Action researchers, whom we have introduced briefly and return to later, are particularly proactive in this respect. They typically seek to ensure that their work benefits participants and their communities, and they seek to share rather than own the research process. Action researchers tend to work with individuals and communities who are ‘excluded’ and ‘oppressed’ in some way (Kindon et al 2007:9) such as people with disabilities (McFarlane and Hansen 2007), migrants (Pratt 2012) and ethnic and racial minorities (Hume- Cook et al 2007
, 2013 ; Nicolaisen and Thorsen, 2014 ; Durcan and Bell, 2015 ; Griffiths, 2017 ; ONS, 2018a ), as is disability. Yet disability is itself strongly associated with socio-economic disadvantage ( Priestley, 2001 ; Jenkins and Rigg, 2004 ; Maroto et al, 2019 ); and it can be a consequence as well as a driver of reduced social contacts ( Lund et al, 2010 ). Much work on social support in general and on the influence of social relationships on (disabled) people’s outcomes focuses on later life ( Berkman, 2000 ; Dykstra, 2009 ; Durcan and Bell, 2015 ; Burholt et al
Introduction Visual impairment is one of the most common disabilities among older adults ( Loh and Ogle, 2004 ; Giloyan et al. 2015 ; Rafaely et al. 2018 ). About 65% of the visually impaired and 82% of the blind people worldwide are those aged 50 and older ( World Health Organization, 2012 ). In fact, most of the major eye diseases are age-related and the prevalence of these vision-threatening conditions increase considerably after age 75 ( Chader and Taylor, 2013 ). A distinguished body of research has illuminated the health risks associated with age
