Methods

Chinese social media censorship constitutes the largest selective suppression of human communication in history. It is often assumed that the Chinese Government censors any criticism of its members and policies, but research by a team at Harvard University has shown this is not quite the case. Professor Gary King, due to deliver the keynote lecture at this year’s ESRC Research Methods Festival, explains how he and students stumbled across their findings while undertaking methodological research and discusses how they might shed a new light on what the Chinese censor and why.

Is mixed methods research a turbulent environment and is innovation being stifled by an overly tightly bound concept of what it is? Sharlene Hesse-Biber, professor in the Sociology Department of Boston College thinks so. Professor Hesse-Biber will be giving a Key Lecture at the ESRC Research Methods Festival in July where she will explain her thinking, how she has been reflecting on 20 years of mixed methods teaching and her hopes for the future. In this podcast, she gives a taster of what we can expect.

What is inclusive research? How do we recognize it, understand it, do it, and know when it is done well? It’s a much-talked about topic among the research and policy communities alike and one that’s now been addressed in a book 'What is inclusive research?' by NCRM co-director Professor Melanie Nind at the University of Southampton. As well as looking at how and why more inclusive approaches to research have evolved, the book explores how inclusive research fits into the key debates and policy shifts. Professor Nind concludes with an overview of how far inclusive research has come, the next challenges, and the emergent understandings of what quality means and looks like in inclusive research, something she hopes will become evident at this year’s Research Methods Festival.

The NCRM funded project 'Integrating emerging smartphone and genetic initiatives to produce cost-effective, innovative methodology' hopes to produce an unprecedented research tool and data source to transform the ability of social scientists to look at the interaction of hereditary factors, and people's daily environment and behaviour. Dr Alex Kogan from the University of Cambridge explains more about the project in this podcast.

Cultural and technological change has made the web a possible and even desirable mode for complex social surveys, but the financial challenges faced by the Research Councils and the UK Government has accelerated this shift, creating an urgent need to explore both its potential and hazards for a range of studies. While progress has been made, there has been no real consensus about how this can best be achieved while maintaining population representativeness and preserving data quality. In this podcast Gerry Nicolaas from NatCen Social Research talks about GenPopWeb, a network of experts and professionals looking to change that.

From the challenge of envisioning our own futures to the storytelling skills of Barack Obama, a new book from the Professor Molly Andrews (NOVELLA node) explores how the links between stories and imagination affect the way we live. Narrative Imagination and Everyday Life by Professor Molly Andrews is published by Oxford University Press.

The effect of ethnic diversity on communities has become an increasingly hot topic. Many academics and policy makers believe that ethnically diverse communities are characterised by distrust and low levels of social cohesion, while numerous studies show an apparent negative link between the ethnic diversity of local communities and the extent to which residents express trust in, and a sense of cohesion with, one another. In this podcast NCRM Director Patrick Sturgis discusses new research that shows a different and more complex picture.

A unique collaboration between two NCRM nodes - Talisman and the Hub is working on new methods for the simulation of 'social networks' in UK cities in order to show how individual people move around and are brought together within different residential and non-residential environments. The aim is to produce a simulation which maps individuals not just by their place of usual residence (as in the Census for example) but traces their movement patterns around the city in small parcels of elapsed time. The research could ultimately have useful applications in a range of areas from flood defence to emergency planning. In this podcast NCRM's Co-Director Professor David Martin explains the background to the project, the opportunities and challenges around using phones and Twitter in the research and talks about some of the innovative ideas being explored by early career researchers using the models created in the project.

Although the 20th century witnessed significant improvements in health in most countries including people living longer, older people in developed countries still account for the large majority of people in poor health. There are also clear inequalities in health and a growing body of research has demonstrated the persistence of health inequalities at older ages. It's a subject that the team at the NCRM-funded node Pathways have been looking at in recent months and in this podcast, Dr George Ploubidis explains more about the research and findings, the implications for policy makers and the importance of further robust evidence in this area to ensure effective policy interventions.

Just how many interviews is enough? That is a question that students conducting a piece of qualitative research frequently ask. It is also a big question for early career researchers and established academics when they are designing research projects. Dr Sarah Baker from Middlesex University and Professor Rosalind Edwards from NCRM decided to address this question in an NCRM working paper that has since been downloaded more than 20,000 times. In this podcast Rosalind Edwards from NCRM talks about how they went about answering how many qualitative interviews is enough?