Social Research Methods and Research Practices > Social Research Methods
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This paper presents the findings of longitudinal research conducted in Ethiopia exploring the effects of COVID-19 school closures on children’s holistic learning, including their socio-emotional and academic learning. It draws on data from over 2,000 pupils captured in 2019 and 2021 to compare primary school children’s dropout and learning before and after school closures. The study adapts self-reporting scales used in similar contexts to measure grade 4–6 pupils’ social skills and numeracy. Findings highlight the risk of widening inequality regarding educational access and outcomes, related to pupils’ gender, age, wealth and location. They also highlight a decline in social skills following school closures and identify a positive and significant relationship between pupils’ social skills and numeracy over time. In conclusion, we recommend a need for education systems to promote children’s holistic learning, which is even more vital in the aftermath of the pandemic.
Employment re-entry opportunities decrease with age. For middle-aged welfare benefit recipients, employment obstacles connected to age exacerbate further disadvantages connected to welfare receipt. At the same time, there is considerable diversity in middle-aged welfare benefit recipients’ long-term employment trajectories, which has thus far received little attention. Policies aim to increase labour market participation at higher ages. To this end, it is important to understand specific difficulties and to be realistic when formulating goals for people with very diverse types of employment histories. Using large-scale register data, this paper’s focus is on a cohort aged 45–54 in August 2012 in Germany. Sequence analysis aids in identifying characteristics relevant to employment histories over the past 19 years, from January 1993 to July 2012. Subsequent employment outcomes over the time span September 2012 to December 2018 are investigated, differentiating between jobs of different quality, and effects of training programmes on these outcomes are analysed using entropy balancing methods. Findings are that middle-aged welfare recipients’ employment biographies are very diverse, ranging from very little employment experience, over long histories of intermittent employment, to long continuous employment histories. Employment history attributes significantly affect employment prospects. The analyses further show that it is not too late to invest in skills, independent of employment history type.
Studies examining the relationship between young maternal age and maternal outcomes are often cross-sectional or short term. We review birth cohort studies that investigate life course outcomes of teen mothers past age 25. Strengths of birth cohort studies include a focus on a complete cohort, rather than a sample, and prospective data collection beginning before or at birth. Limitations are high cost, attrition and unmeasured background factors. Some 20 studies from six countries met study criteria. This narrative review describes how teenage mothers fare as adults, identifies factors that modify outcomes and examines whether outcomes reflect specific time periods or cohorts.
Childhood disadvantage was a greater marker of teen mothering in more recent cohorts, even in countries with strong social welfare programmes. The effects of young maternal age on all outcomes diminished when strong controls adjusted for selectivity into teen mothering.
The ethics of care can be both a perspective from within which to analyse research data, and a guide to the process of conducting analysis together with others. In this chapter authors recount different approaches used by researchers to actively engage research participants in the process of data analysis. They outline Sevenhuijsen’s ‘Trace’ analysis that was developed to enable a critical analysis of policy from an ethic of care. In line with the purposive nature of care this encompasses not only critique but also renewal. A care ethics perspective invites different questions in approaching research data. Undertaking analysis is often a new experience for research participants, but relationships built during the research process can help people feel comfortable in talking about emotional responses to data as well as thoughts from different perspectives. Different modes of involvement at this stage can connect with different priorities of participants. This links to the use of creative methods for reporting research findings and drawing out implications for policy and practice. All participants can experience transformative change and we recount ways this influenced future work. We also consider the importance of taking care in how we end research relationships.
The authors draw on Sayer’s arguments about the necessity of recognising ‘what matters’ to people in social science research. They develop this as a basis for thinking of different ways of caring about research, and also the necessity for thinking in different ways about emotions, knowledge and their interactions in the way in which we research. The intersections between knowledge and justice are explored through the concepts of epistemic or cognitive justice, and the impact of exclusive assumptions about authoritative knowers and dominant epistemologies discussed in the context of both colonialism and the marginalisation of specific social groups. The significance of emotions is discussed as a necessary source of insight into meanings, but also to explore how emotions can be generated through the research process for both researchers and those whose lives they study. Participatory research seeks to include different knowledges and the emotional dimension of experience, but is not always experienced positively. Collaborations between indigenous and non-indigenous researchers offer insights for those seeking to adopt care-based approaches.
The ethical dilemmas of research are not always predictable. The ethics of care offers a guide to recognising and responding to the relational ethical challenges of research, and to how caring relations can optimise positive outcomes. Understanding research as a dynamic relational practice helps develop competences and generate substantive insights from the way we work together. Conversations with other researchers highlighted the importance of focusing on the process of research as a space in which transformations can occur. But research reports focus on outcomes and there is often little space for consideration of process. Here authors recount stories of projects not previously included in published outputs, but which offer learning that is often as significant as formal ‘findings’. These include conceptual discussions across cultures as well as an explicit focus on what caring for co-researchers means in practice in different contexts. This includes both practical and emotional support. The chapter also reflects on roles of reviewers in research.
Researching with Care applies feminist care ethics to reimagine research as a caring practice. If we care about what we research, do we recognise that others care in different ways and for different reasons? What does this mean for the way we research, who we research with and what we seek to achieve as a result? Drawing on their own and others’ direct experiences of undertaking participatory research in particular, the authors consider all stages of research, from inception – how we think about research questions, through the ways we work with collaborators and those we are researching – to impact – what legacy do we seek to leave behind us? Applying Fisher and Tronto’s definition of caring they consider research as one of the ‘things we do’ to help us live in the world as well as possible. Thus, they argue for research to be conducted in a way that enables the pursuit of justice and wellbeing. This means recognising the injustices arising from research that does not acknowledge different types and sources of knowledge, and the harms done when researchers do not care about ‘research subjects’. The authors adopt a multi- and post-disciplinary approach and explore the contribution of indigenous scholars and people with lived experience in developing caring research practices.
Researching with Care applies feminist care ethics to reimagine research as a caring practice. If we care about what we research, do we recognise that others care in different ways and for different reasons? What does this mean for the way we research, who we research with and what we seek to achieve as a result? Drawing on their own and others’ direct experiences of undertaking participatory research in particular, the authors consider all stages of research, from inception – how we think about research questions, through the ways we work with collaborators and those we are researching – to impact – what legacy do we seek to leave behind us? Applying Fisher and Tronto’s definition of caring they consider research as one of the ‘things we do’ to help us live in the world as well as possible. Thus, they argue for research to be conducted in a way that enables the pursuit of justice and wellbeing. This means recognising the injustices arising from research that does not acknowledge different types and sources of knowledge, and the harms done when researchers do not care about ‘research subjects’. The authors adopt a multi- and post-disciplinary approach and explore the contribution of indigenous scholars and people with lived experience in developing caring research practices.
The book concludes by offering personal reflections on how the ethics of care has become significant for the authors. They recognise the intersection of personal and political in the way they seek to expand and improve their understanding of the world. Caring about the issues we research includes taking responsibility for contributing to repairing harms and enhancing justice. What this means in practice must relate to particular contexts: whether that be working with indigenous researchers experiencing the impact of colonialism, with old people who we can recognise as our future selves, or with people living with mental health difficulties we may never experience. In these (and other) diverse contexts the ethics of care can offer a guide to how we research and how we make sense of research data. The authors set out a series of questions that can be helpful in approaching research with care. They cite a poem by a Māori researcher that warns of the harms uncaring research can do. They emphasise the importance of attentive listening as well as space for conversation and storytelling. The book ends with reflections on the urgency of caring research practices in current circumstances of climate crisis, pandemic and worsening inequalities.
Traditional approaches to research emphasise methodological questions about data collection and analysis rather than approaching research as a relational practice. This chapter starts to explore what researching with care means in practice through focusing on the different relationships it is necessary to develop and sustain when carrying out research. The authors identify troubles they have experienced as researchers that centre around relationships with those whose lives they were researching or those with whom they have carried out research. Different types of relationships are involved: with co-researchers, with commissioners or funders as well as with those being researched. The issues involved are political as well as personal and impact both what gets researched and who is involved in this. Gilligan’s foundational work on care ethics is reviewed to both highlight ways in which a lack of voice or invisibility in research can generate harms, and as a basis from which to argue the potential of care ethics in revealing the nature of those harms and offering a framework within which they might be repaired. Authors argue that ‘researching with’ has the potential to generate solidarity.
