Methods

Declining support for the main parties, allied with the rise of UKIP and the aftermath of the Scottish Independence Referendum mean that the 2015 General Election promises to be one of the most difficult to predict for many years. In addition to changes in the political landscape, the ways in which political scientists and pollsters seek to understand and predict electoral preferences have also undergone considerable transformation. At an event hosted by NCRM and the British Election Study (BES), and sponsored by the British Polling Council, Professor John Curtice from the University of Strathclyde talked through some of the key factors that might help us pick through the facts and figures and the speculation. Afterwards, he spoke to Christine Garrington for the NCRM Podcast Series.

To probe or not to probe respondents' initial answers of "Don't know" is a key question when it comes to tackling the problem of nonresponse in surveys. In an NCRM funded Methodological Innovation Project on Item nonresponse and measurement error in cross-national surveys, Jouni Kuha from LSE has been working with colleagues at LSE and City University to see whether asking interviewers to probe respondents further affects both the quantity and the quality of their answers. He talks to Christine Garrington about findings from the research and what he thinks they mean for those involved in survey design and management.

Dr. Matthew Williams and Dr. Pete Burnap from the NCRM funded Crime Sensing with Social Media project talk about the core ideas behind the founding of the ESRC supported Collaborative Online Social Media Observatory (COSMOS), highlight some of the emerging findings from the first 3 years of their projects on crime sensing, racial tension, cyberhate and Twitter user demographics, and discuss the future of the COSMOS programme and the role it has in improving our understanding of how 'online' publics' organise and react to national and global events and in democratising social media data access and big 'social' data analysis. COSMOS is a collaboration between the universities of Cardiff (Williams, Burnap, Sloan, Housley, Edwards, Rana & Morgan) Warwick (Procter) and St. Andrews (Voss).

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.

An increasing number of academics and researchers are seeking to exploit the rich data available on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. One organisation leading the way is the think-tank Demos, whose Centre for the Analysis of Social Media is working to produce political, social and policy insight and understanding through social media research. Its Director Jamie Bartlett was one of the presenters at the ESRC Research Methods Festival 2014 session on the challenges and opportunities of using social media for social science research.

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.

A better understanding of paradata, or the by-products of the collection of survey data, could help researchers gain insights into issues around survey quality and costs. That's according to a team of NCRM-funded researchers who have been examining the paradata around Peter Townsend’s famous Poverty in the UK study, undertaken in the late 1960s. Professor Ros Edwards explains more about what paradata is, the different ways in which it can be examined and what she and the team have learned about the study, the people involved in it and the implications of the team’s findings for survey research today.

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.

Chronic pain affects nearly 10 million Britons and can result in time off work and poor quality of life for many of them. Diagnosing and treating chronic pain can be particularly difficult relying heavily on the patient’s ability to communicate their symptoms to health professionals who must then listen and interpret those symptoms. New NCRM funded research by Dr Jen Tarr and colleagues from the London School of Economics have been examining innovative non-verbal ways of communicating pain to see whether pain can be expressed through more than just words.

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.