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Creative research methods can help to answer complex contemporary questions which are hard to answer using conventional methods alone. Creative methods can also be more ethical, helping researchers to address social injustice.
This bestselling book, now in its second edition, is the first to identify and examine the five areas of creative research methods:
• arts-based research
• embodied research
• research using technology
• multi-modal research
• transformative research frameworks.
Written in an accessible, practical and jargon-free style, with reflective questions, boxed text and a companion website to guide student learning, it offers numerous examples of creative methods in practice from around the world. This new edition includes a wealth of new material, with five extra chapters and over 200 new references. Spanning the gulf between academia and practice, this useful book will inform and inspire researchers by showing readers why, when, and how to use creative methods in their research.
Since the mid-2010s, virtual reality (VR) technology has advanced rapidly. This book explores the many opportunities that VR can offer for humanities and social sciences researchers.
The book provides a user-friendly, non-technical methods guide to using ready-made VR content and 360° video as well as creating custom materials. It examines the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to using VR, providing helpful, real-world examples of how researchers have used the technology. The insights drawn from this analysis will inspire scholars to explore the possibilities of using VR in their own research projects.
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.
is known as ‘intersectionality’ (Crenshaw 1994), a concept used to acknowledge identity as both multifaceted and closely linked with its social and geographical context (Naples and Gurr 2010: 24). After all, nobody is ‘only’ a woman, or a person of colour, or someone with a disability. An intersectional approach does not attempt to take into account every aspect of someone’s identity, but aims to accept and reflect the complexity of identity and to examine the relationships between different aspects of identity and their implications for power relations
: 1430), and several follow-up interviews with three of those children. She also conducted Technology-based and multi-modal data analysis 161 group interviews with six professional rehabilitation workers and seven children who had no disabilities. Five adults who had been using prosthetic legs since childhood took part in individual interviews and then in a group interview. Hussain also interviewed five Buddhist monks and four shamans to find out more about cultural views of disability and health. An interpreter assisted the researcher, as most of the interviews
customised to allow players with disabilities to build a set of control mechanisms around their particular physical constraints – the Xbox Adaptive Controller being an important example of this ( Stark and Sarkar, 2018 ). For VR, there have been some community-led projects, such as WalkinVR, which remaps the buttons on handheld controllers in order to replace body movement when using Steam VR games. In order to explore how games might be better adapted for wheelchair users, Gerling et al ( 2020 ) built a series of game prototypes to test with disabled participants. This
and videos are also useful for people who have memory or attention problems, as they can be played over and over again. Because they don’t rely on the written word, podcasts and videos can be useful communication tools for researchers working with people who have literacy problems or some forms of learning disabilities. These technologies are also useful as a tool in teaching research methods. The use of technology for research purposes also raises a whole new set of ethical problems for researchers to solve. For example, mobile devices, such as smartphones
intended to illustrate the range and diversity of approaches to data analysis. Box 8.2: Life-course analysis by Brittain and Green UK researchers Ian Brittain and Sarah Green used life-course analysis to study the rehabilitation of former soldiers after disabilities sustained in combat. The ‘life-course’ is the sequence of different roles and situations an individual finds themselves in over time. The life-course exists in a wider historical and socioeconomic context, containing systems of opportunities and constraints, within which individuals can make choices and
of games (such as discourses of disability in Mass Effect , Jerreat-Poole, 2020 ). Both approaches have relevance to scholars interested in working with existing VR content. A review at the subgenre scale can be used to explore how discourses shift over time (such as the evolution of first-person shooters (FPSs), Hitchens, 2011 ). This can be particularly valuable when examining eras with the kind of rapid development we are seeing in the third wave of VR. Close textual analysis, meanwhile, is very familiar among literary scholars and others in the humanities
world specifically for deaf students, and staff are required to be fluent in American Sign Language (ASL). The university had a teacher-preparation programme to prepare teachers for working with deaf students who had an emotional or physical disability. Mertens led a transformative evaluation of this programme. Her first step was to gather a research team that reflected the diversity of the community of teachers in deaf education: two were ‘culturally deaf’ (born deaf and grew up using ASL), a third was also deaf but grew up using her voice and lip-reading, and
