Qualitative Social Science Research Articles

Impacts of community-led energy retrofitting of owner-occupied dwellings

Community-led approaches have emerged in the UK as an alternative route for realizing reductions in domestic energy demand through changes in homeowners' understanding and behaviours when coupled with physical retrofitting. A socio-technical approach is used to develop and apply a monitoring and evaluation framework. This framework comprises assessment of longitudinal energy use, in-situ monitoring and qualitative social science surveys in order to evaluate the impacts (on changing individual and household energy behaviours) and effectiveness (on achieving real savings in energy use and carbon emissions) of energy retrofits of 27 owner-occupied homes across six low carbon communities (LCCs). Results indicate that the energy retrofits have been reasonably effective in terms of reducing energy use in dwellings (75% of homes experienced reductions in gas and/or electricity use). The research also reveals wider impacts of retrofits on indoor environmental conditions and behaviours of the occupants. Such impacts, intended or otherwise, may not be always positive; however, the LCCs appear particularly successful in facilitating the households, through increased motivations, capability, awareness and knowledge relating to energy use and behaviours. Insights from the study can help to inform future strategy implementation for reducing energy demand from existing housing to meet national CO2 targets.

Interviewing as a Data Collection Method: A Critical Review

Through this paper I would critically assess the value and limitations of interviewing as a research instrument. Therefore, my discussion, which would be based on methodological issues allied with the use of interviews in qualitative social science research, is two-fold. Firstly, I briefly review the literature concerning the use of interviews, discuss interviews' types and illustrate the differences between these types. Then, issues regarding interviewing in practice will be discussed, ending this part with a brief review of the notion of interviewing in linguistic research. Secondly, a critical evaluation of the method will be presented, including a consideration of its usefulness and pitfalls, followed by discussing issues of validity and reliability of using interviews as a research instrument. To end with, ethical issues concerning the use of interviews will be discussed before drawing on our conclusion.

Transgressions of the man on the moon: climate change, Indigenous expertise, and the posthumanist ethics of place and space

Indigenous peoples have been enrolled in climate change research for decades, participating in data-gathering, as writing collaborators, and serving as the symbolic “canary in the coal mine” for public outreach and policy-making. They have indeed experienced some of the most rapid environmental changes, but rather than emphasize their vulnerabilities, we argue their expertise is narrowly understood in formulating knowledge; the research on climate change has a limited understanding of what it might mean to be inter- or trans-disciplinary because research is formulated exclusively through the assumptions of Enlightenment thought, without sufficiently engaging non-Western subjectivities. Qualitative social sciences and “Indigenous methodologies” can be used to better achieve trans-disciplinarity; in this article we re-tell a story told by Native elders from tribes across Alaska about the “man on the moon.” While literally referring to the US moon landing, elders invoke this story when addressing climate change: it teaches the ethics of the human-nature relationship, developed from a “more-than-human” (or “posthuman”) philosophy. Our data comes from participant-observation and oral history; we draw upon poststructuralist theory, and frame our analysis through the literatures of critical geography, science studies, and American Indian studies. To ensure that Indigenous peoples are not used as props in Western policy agendas, researchers must engage with non-Enlightenment intellectual traditions. More than being a source of data or a symbol of humanity’s ruin, Indigenous wisdom can productively inform sustainable policy agendas to adapt to climate change. What can be learned, for example, is a more-than-human ethics of place and space.

Narrative research in climate change adaptation—Exploring a complementary paradigm for research and governance

Climate adaptation research increasingly focuses on the socio-cultural dimensions of change. In this context, narrative research is often seen as a qualitative social science method used to frame adaptation communication. However, this perspective neglects an important insight provided by narrative theory as applied in the cognitive sciences and other practical fields: human cognition is organized around specific narrative structures. In adaptation, this means that how we ‘story’ the environment determines how we understand and practice adaptation, how risks are defined, who is authorized as actors in the change debate, and the range of policy options considered. Furthermore, relating an experience through story-telling is already doing ‘knowledge work’, or learning. In taking narrative beyond its use as an extractive social research methodology, we argue that narrative research offers an innovative, holistic approach to a better understanding of socio-ecological systems and the improved, participatory design of local adaptation policies. Beyond producing data on local knowledge(s) and socio-cultural and affective-emotive factors influencing adaptive capacity, it can significantly inform public engagement, deliberation and learning strategies–features of systemic adaptive governance. We critically discuss narrative as both a self-reflective methodology and as a paradigmatic shift in future adaptation research and practice. We explore the narrative approach as a basis for participatory learning in the governance of socio-ecological systems. Finally, we assemble arguments for investing in alternative governance approaches consistent with a shift to a ‘narrative paradigm’.

A Crispy Delicacy: Augosoma Beetle as Alternative Source of Protein in East Cameroon

Despite the fact that the exoskeleton of the Augosoma centaurus (Dynastinae) is hard and difficult to chew, this insect is often gathered in Eastern Cameroon for food in periods of availability. Nine ethnic groups in Eastern Cameroon were surveyed to understand the role of this insect in assuring food security, using quantitative and qualitative social science approaches. Both the larvae and adult stages of this beetle are habitually consumed in the areas studied. In total, about 65% of consumers prefer consuming the adults, while 35% prefer consuming the larvae. About 24% of consumers derive the same satisfaction from the consumption of Augosoma or other edible insects. Close to 39% of consumers prefer other edible insects to Augosoma, while 37% prefer the consumption of Augosoma to other edible insects. This beetle usually occurs at a period when other edible insects are not available, therefore constituting a good source of alternative protein in this region where poverty, poaching, and biodiversity erosion are still a major problem. Furthermore, the gathering of this beetle for food is equally a means of biological pest control of raffia plants and a tool to enhance community-based conservation of the areas global biodiversity.

Ethnography as Ethics and Epistemology: Why American Studies Should Embrace Fieldwork, and Why it Hasn’t

In the US American Studies scholarly community, the last thirty years have produced significant changes: changes in the demographics of our practitioners that are marked by the rise of women and members of US minority groups (racial, sexual, and ethnic) to the highest levels of leadership in the American Studies Association (ASA) and the move of scholarship addressing racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual issues to the center of the field. New specialties have emerged to appear on the programs at conferences, too, including disability, performance, and border studies, and there has been a passionate embrace of popular culture as well. A concern with social class remains present, more often invoked than investigated, but it is still part of our scholarly concerns. More slowly, an acknowledgement of the transnational dimensions of US lives and of scholarship regarding the United States produced outside the United States is emerging.Methodologically and theoretically, our work has changed too: myth and symbol studies have given way to work influenced by (among others) feminist theories, critical race studies, cultural studies, the new historicism, deconstruction, sexuality studies, poststructuralism, and postnationalist, postcolonial, and transnationalist concerns.What we haven't done is move substantially closer to the social sciences. For all the invocation of American Studies as an interdisciplinary field/method/ discipline/antidiscipline (fill in the blank) in the United States, it remains deeply social historical and literary, even if the notion of a literary text has been stretched to include comic books, films, fashion, even sport. It is interdisciplinary, yes, but within a restricted yet unarticulated and largely unexamined scope of allowability-within the humanities.1 It hasn't always been this way. The unique legacy of the now-defunct program in American civilization at the University of Pennsylvania long stood for excellence in integrating social science and humanistic approaches. But this model never became the dominant one. It is time for a rigorous reconsideration of this issue.In this article, I argue that we should actively restructure our research, training practices, and institutional formations to more fully integrate the qualitative social sciences, and especially ethnography, into our work. To do so will not only enlarge our constituencies and readerships, but also enable us to better investigate key issues close to the epistemological and political heart of so much American Studies work: the ways in which social hierarchies and social formations shape and are shaped by the lived experiences of those living in or engaging with the United States as a geopolitical entity or cultural imaginary. I hope to help generate a substantial debate within our field about why ethnography is not a central or even defining practice in American Studies scholarship, although some scholars and some programs are supporting this trend and its institutionalization. What intellectual and field formation legacies might have kept it from becoming central? How might we work intellectually and institutionally to change that, as I think we should?To persuasively make a case for this transformation within American Studies, I must do several things. First, I want to demonstrate and document the startling degree to which such an absence actually exists in arenas such as publishing and training explicitly denoted as part of the contemporary American Studies scholarly community. I will then consider some of the reasons why this absence might still prevail twenty-five years after John Caughey first called on us in the pages of the American Quarterly (AQ) to move in that direction.2 Second, I want to argue explicitly for what can be gained by investing our time, intellectual energy, financial resources, and institutional priorities to make the social sciences, and especially ethnography, more central to our practices. …

Pluralism as Multi-Method Scholarship in Qualitative Social Science Research: A Panacea for Methodological Tribalism

Over the years the research endeavours in social sciences have been directed towards producing profound discoveries about humankind and the society they live in. Now-a-days qualitative research has been flourishing in many fields of the social sciences. Rapid social change and the resulting diversification of life scenarios are increasingly confronting social researchers with new social contexts and perspectives. There is a specific relevance for qualitative research to the study of social contexts and life situations. This has lead to the development of several social theories and social research methods which have still continued to develop in order to understand the diverse social problems. The challenge for social scientists and researchers worldwide is to continue in the search for a unified consensus on what methodology is to be adopted for research for meeting the emerging diverse needs of humankind and the society. This thought has led to the proliferation of pluralism or multi-method research in which the researcher synthesizes multiple research methodologies in order to study social problems in a holistic way. This concept of pluralism in research has to a greater extend subverted methodological tribalism which had existed till the recent past. This paper focuses on the philosophical assumptions as guidelines to research paradigms have influenced the development of social research theory and social research methods towards pluralism. This paper intends to explore pluralism in qualitative Social Science researches as it may be applied methodologically and philosophically. In this context, the paper heeds a thought on refocusing pluralistic qualitative research in terms of its needs and demands based on the level and depth of the study undertaken. Key Terms: Qualitative research, methodological pluralism, research paradigms, philosophical assumptions

Considering Quantitative and Qualitative Issues Together

Quantitative and qualitative researchers use different methods and have different goals. At the level of methods, quantitative researchers criticize qualitative researchers for not performing null hypothesis significance tests. However, I review literature showing that these are invalid, and so it is not particularly meaningful to criticize a lack of performance of something that should not be performed anyhow. More generally, I suggest that there are strengths and limitations to quantitative and qualitative methods. The more interesting question pertains to goals, and quantitative and qualitative researchers differ there, too. I briefly mention some limitations of the usual quantitative goal, which is to find causal mechanisms. But a typical qualitative goal of describing personal or subjective experience also has limitations. Finally, I compare both quantitative and qualitative social science research to physics and show that each has similarities and differences. There is much for quantitative and qualitative social science researchers to gain, not only by considering each other's methods and goals carefully but also by going outside social science and considering the accomplishments in nonsocial sciences.

Jane Addams as a Resource for Developing a Reflexively Realist Social Science Practice

The last four decades have seen a reflexive turn in the qualitative social sciences, an increased self-consciousness about the culturally contingent nature of our methods of representing human experience. This has given rise to a wave of experimentation in social science writing. Scholars have sought to develop research that does not just describe the object of study but also deliberately transforms the subject of the reader. In recent years, however, there is a growing sentiment that the obduracy of social reality seems to have been underemphasized in much of this experimentation. This article examines the inquiry methods of turn-of-the-century social theorist and settlement house founder, Jane Addams. The paper identifies themes in Addams’s approach to inquiry that was ahead of her time and relevant to this contemporary discussion. The paper argues that Addams has much to offer as an effort to develop a reflexively realist approach to social science inquiry.

Replicability and Comprehensibility of Social Research and Its Technical Implementation

This paper is a contribution to the methodological and technical discussion of social research infrastructure. The main question is how to store and manage data in a way that meets the increasing demand for secondary data analysis in both quantitative and qualitative social science research. The first two sections focus mainly on aspects of data documentation, in particular on the unification of various documentation requirements that have arisen across ongoing projects of the SFB 882. While the aim of documenting quantitative research processes is to ensure replicability, the aim of documenting qualitative projects is to maintain the understandability and informative value of research data. In the third section a virtual research environment (VRE) is presented that provides both a generic work platform and a project-specific research platform. The work platform bundles IT resources by bringing together various tools for administration, project management, and time- and location-independent collaboration in a single environment adapted to researchers’ specific work processes. The research component combines data management with further developments in social science methodologies. It provides services for the archiving and reuse of data and enables the infrastructural and methodological coordination of data documentation. We also introduce a documentation scheme for qualitative and quantitative social research within the SFB 882. This scheme considers the specific requirements of research projects within the SFB, such as different methods (e.g. panel analysis, experimental approaches, ethnography, and interview research), project work, and requirements of long-term research.

Using qualitative reasoning for social simulation of crowds

The ability to model and reason about the potential violence level of a demonstration is important to the police decision making process. Unfortunately, existing knowledge regarding demonstrations is composed of partial qualitative descriptions without complete and precise numerical information. In this article we describe a first attempt to use qualitative reasoning techniques to model demonstrations. To our knowledge, such techniques have never been applied to modeling and reasoning regarding crowd behaviors, nor in particular demonstrations. We develop qualitative models consistent with the partial, qualitative social science literature, allowing us to model the interactions between different factors that influence violence in demonstrations. We then utilize qualitative simulation to predict the potential eruption of violence, at various levels, based on a description of the demographics, environmental settings, and police responses. We incrementally present and compare three such qualitative models. The results show that while two of these models fail to predict the outcomes of real-world events reported and analyzed in the literature, one model provides good results. We also examine whether a popular machine learning algorithm (decision tree learning) can be used. While the results show that the decision trees provide improved predictions, we show that the QR models can be more sensitive to changes, and can account for what-if scenarios, in contrast to decision trees. Moreover, we introduce a novel analysis algorithm that analyzes the QR simulations, to automatically determine the factors that are most important in influencing the outcome in specific real-world demonstrations. We show that the algorithm identifies factors that correspond to experts' analysis of these events.

Red stamps and green tea: fieldwork negotiations and dilemmas in the Sino‐Vietnamese borderlands

The socialist spaces within the upland Southeast Asian Massif are home to over 70 million people belonging to geographically dispersed and politically fragmented ethnic minority populations. State authorities have long considered these upland margins as frontier regions where ‘inconsequential peoples’ lag behind national standards. Over time, the Chinese and Vietnamese states have worked to enclose these spaces through a range of ‘development’ programmes and politico‐economic strategies. Undertaking qualitative social science research here is underscored by a specific set of challenges (red stamps), dilemmas and negotiations (green tea). In a contemporary context that interweaves economic liberalisation with centralised and authoritarian political structures, I explore how I have negotiated and manoeuvred access to ethnic minority voices. Specifically, I focus on fieldwork endeavours in the Sino‐Vietnamese borderlands to answer two core questions. First, in these socialist arenas, how can researchers negotiate access to still‐marginalised groups misunderstood by the central state? And second, what are the most pressing ethical questions raised by cross‐cultural fieldwork in these spaces and how might these be addressed? While debating these ethical and methodological challenges, I reflect upon the numerous roles of gatekeepers, concerns over the well‐being of interviewees and the importance of self‐censorship.

Ethnographie und ihre Folgen für die Kulturgeographie: eine Kritik des Netzwerkkonzepts in Studien zu translokaler Mobilität

Abstract. The aim of this article is to show the difference between an interpretative-hermeneutic ethnographic approach deeply embedded in the history of anthropology and ethnographic methods introduced as part of a social science repertoire. Taking the classical "network" as an example, it contrasts the way this concept is generally used in studies on translocal mobility with interpretations of ethnographic research. This not only opens up critical reflections on the role of "networks" when it comes to understanding translocality as a lived experience, but also illustrates what it actually means to follow an interpretative-hermeneutic approach in which ethnographic material is seen to serve as a way to ground, question and refine abstract concepts. The article thus argues that it is through ethnographies and their inherent openness towards the field that a more enriching and creative engagement with theories and methodologies can be achieved than qualitative social science approaches usually allow for.

Dancing with Social Ghosts: Performing Embodiments, Analyzing Critically

AbstractThis study traces and analyses gestures, postures, and movements in hip‐hop dance to examine circulations of physicalized histories, experiences, and affects of Black and Brown bodies as productions of knowledge. The significance of Black and Brown embodiments as excess that accumulates over time when their presence is undertheorized, concealed, or sidestepped is considered. At the intersection of theory and methodology, a framework of embodiment is presented toward imagining the possibilities that can be created in qualitative social science research when Black and Brown bodies are acknowledged as sites of knowledge production and when critical embodiments are accessed and confronted rather than evacuated.

How Do We Quote Black and Brown Bodies? Critical Reflections on Theorizing and Analyzing Embodiments

This article is a reflection on the development of an embodied data analysis framework, leading to critical interrogations of the micro level black and brown physical performances of culture and what they reveal about macro level social inequality. Working at the intersections of social science, dance, performance, and qualitative research as well as commitments to a social science that enacts a decolonizing methodology/pedagogy, an analytic framework is choreographed toward imagining possibilities that can be created in qualitative social science research when black and brown bodies and their performances are acknowledged as sites of knowledge production.

How we think: digital media and contemporary technogenesis

do we think? N. Katherine Hayles poses this question at the beginning of this bracing exploration of the idea that we think through, with, and alongside media. As the age of print passes and new technologies appear every day, this proposition has become far more complicated, particularly for the traditionally print-based disciplines in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. With a rift growing between digital scholarship and its print-based counterpart, Hayles argues for contemporary technogenesis-the belief that humans and technics are coevolving-and advocates for what she calls comparative media studies, a new approach to locating digital work within print traditions and vice versa. mines the evolution of the field from the traditional humanities and how the digital humanities are changing academic scholarship, research, teaching, and publication. She goes on to depict the neurological consequences of working in digital media, where skimming and scanning, or hyper reading, and analysis through machine algorithms are forms of reading as valid as close reading once was. Hayles contends that we must recognize all three types of reading and understand the limitations and possibilities of each. In addition to illustrating what a comparative media perspective entails, Hayles explores the technogenesis spiral in its full complexity. She considers the effects of early databases such as telegraph code books and confronts our changing perceptions of time and space in the digital age, illustrating this through three innovative digital productions - Steve Tomasula's electronic novel, TOC; Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts; and Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions. Deepening our understanding of the extraordinary transformative powers digital technologies have placed in the hands of humanists, How We Think presents a cogent rationale for tackling the challenges facing the humanities today.

THE CHALLENGES OF RURAL AREAS IN SERBIA PROMISING TOURIST ACTIVITIES

Challenges of rural areas in Serbia are complex categories, so the work set itself a goal to show how these challenges can help its people interested, which are still developing tourism within the region. In order to prove all, work have to use qualitative and quantitative social science methodology with emphasis on induction, conversion multiplier, surveys in the statistical models. With such methodology, work, has distinct hypotheses: If the rural areas of each country carries a multi-purpose economic dependence, then the rural areas of Serbia must accept tourism as a positive economic challenge, and Tourism in rural areas, if there is a guaranteed capacity of tolerance, must provide rural area to be feedback of its successful economic development. Work, emphasizing challenges of rural areas in tourist activity, has to give results compatible with evidence of field research and indicate directions of tourism development in Serbia rural areas.

Philistinism and the Preservation of Nature

AbstractIt is clear that natural entities can be preserved – they can be preserved because they can be harmed or destroyed, or in various other ways adversely affected. I argue that in light of the rise of scientism and other forms of philistinism, the political, religious, mythic, personal and historical meanings that people find in those entities can also be preserved. Against those who impugn disciplines such as fine arts, philosophy and sociology, I contend that this sort of preservation requires the efforts of those whose work exemplifies the core values of the arts, the humanities and the qualitative social sciences.

An Analytic Glossary to Social Inquiry Using Institutional and Political Activist Ethnography

This analytic glossary, composed of 52 terms, is a practical reference and working tool for persons preparing to conduct theoretically informed qualitative social science research drawing from institutional and political activist ethnography. Researchers using these approaches examine social problems and move beyond interpretation by explicating how these problems are organized and what social and ruling relations coordinate them. Political activist ethnography emerges from, and extends, institutional ethnography by producing knowledge explicitly for activism and social movement organizing ends. The assemblage of vocabulary and ideas in this word list are new, and build on existing methodological resources. This glossary offers an extensive, analytic, and challenging inventory of language that brings together terms from these ethnographic approaches with shared ancestry. This compilation is designed to serve as an accessible “one-stop-shop” resource for persons using or contemplating using institutional and political activist ethnography in their research and/or activist projects.

Irish Studies and the Corporate University

Irish Studies and the Corporate University Stephen Watt In academic year 2010-2011, the University of Oregon, after adopting a budgeting system borrowed from corporate America, "Responsibility-Centered Management" or RCM, defended its choice by trumpeting its supposed virtues or "fundamental principles" on the web.1 Bullet-pointed claims on the university's site assert that RCM will guarantee "Transparency—everyone knows the rules and has access to the information they need"; "Accountability—decision makers have clear lines of responsibility"; "Equity—everyone is playing by the same rules and is held to the same standards"; and "Predictability—the rules don't change without broad discussion and lots of warning."2 When updated in 2010, the Oregon website provided the uninitiated with an overview of RCM institutions, which included the "University of Toronto, University of Michigan, University of Southern California, and University of Indiana [sic]"—along with a list of titles for further reading, one of which is a report from my home institution, "RCM at Indiana University Bloomington 1990-2000." This list is not entirely accurate, and "University of Indiana" is not its only mistake; the University of Michigan, for example, has drastically revised its implementation of a version of RCM. As it happens, the report from Indiana that the site recommends clearly explains that the principles or goals identified by the Oregon committee are difficult both to attain and to measure. For example, in the twenty years of RCM at Indiana University, the projects of transparency and equity have scarcely been realized; indeed, as a department chair for five years and an associate dean for four more, I have attempted to plumb the [End Page 83] depths of RCM several times, never entirely confident that my understanding of its operations is adequate. It is always possible that I lack sufficient analytic ability to attain this stage of enlightenment, yet, when asking my fellow administrators (one of them a senior economist) to review my conclusions, I have received little by way of correction or refinement. One thing, however, is certain: RCM works with "predictability," for it is predictable that the opacity and inequity it produces—or, at the very least, exacerbates—will continue. Still, Oregon's promotion of the "fundamental principles" of RCM is useful to consider, as it serves as a kind of emblem of the corporatization of the contemporary university and its negative impact on the humanities and the qualitative social sciences: that is, the same disciplines that constitute Irish Studies. To put it bluntly, Oregon's and others' praise of RCM confirms the insight of the philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his award-winging 2005 book, that "One of the most salient features of our culture is that that there is so much bullshit."3 Let me outline the basis of this indictment. While the University of Oregon was announcing its implementation of RCM, on the other side of the country during the same academic year, another committee in Gainesville, Florida, was mucking the same stall: rationalizing RCM as a prelude to adoption. As a committee at the University of Florida deliberated RCM's feasibility, it posted numerous PowerPoint slides online, including one in 2008 that asked the question, "Why change budget models?" It adduced several answers, including increased self-reliance, the promotion of innovative and entrepreneurial activities, and thus, the generation of new revenue sources to offset a sharp decrease in state support.4 This is a familiar litany: with declining support for public universities in California, Florida, Colorado, Oregon, and elsewhere, academic units must become more business-like and, finally, more profitable. Even in those halcyon days of 1990 when the adoption of RCM at Indiana was accompanied by an assumption of "annual increases in state funding" to the campus, innovation and entrepreneurship were privileged as benefits of the system leading to increased grant-writing activity, to a greater participation in online course development for new "markets" of students, to a more engaged relationship with alumni, and so on.5 RCM, according to the 2000 report of the review committee at Indiana, encourages "more attention to mutually advantageous partnering opportunities," motivates the "review of inefficient or outdated programs," and reallocates [End Page 84] resources "to higher...