Forum: Qualitative Social Research  

Jarg Bergold,Stefan Thomas

This article serves as an introduction to the FQS special issue "Participatory Qualitative Research." In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in participatory research strategies. The articles in this special issue come from different disc... see more

Marit Borg,Bengt Karlsson,Hesook Suzie Kim,Brendan McCormack

The key epistemological assumption in participatory research is the belief that knowledge is embedded in the lives and experiences of individuals and that knowledge is developed only through a cooperative process between researchers and experiencing indiv... see more

Hella von Unger

Participatory research aims to study and change social reality in collaborative ways. The concept of participation plays a key role. In this article, I clarify the concept using the example of a participatory health research study. The study design presen... see more

Stephanie Goeke,Dagmar Kubanski

Currently people with disabilities have a small or non-existent presence in research activities that explore the lives of people like them. However, there is a strong tradition of such research in special education and medical research. In this article we... see more

Tina Cook

The term participatory research is now widely used as a way of categorising research that has moved beyond researching "on" to researching "with" participants. This paper draws attention to some confusions that lie behind such categorisation and the poten... see more

Jasna Russo

Survivor-controlled research in the field of mental health can be perceived as the most extended development of participatory research. This is not only because it does away with the role of research subjects, but because the experiential knowledge (as op... see more

Veronika Wöhrer,Bernhard Höcher

We introduce several social research projects carried out by five junior researchers and 17 11-13-year-old pupils at a secondary modern school in Vienna. We describe processes of negotiations between researchers, pupils and the teacher about the framework... see more

Claire McCartan,Dirk Schubotz,Jonathan Murphy

Research in young people by young people is a growing trend and considered a democratic approach to exploring their lives. Qualitative research is also seen as a way of redistributing power; with participatory research positioned by many as a democratic p... see more

Audrey M. Dentith,Lynda Measor,Michael P. O'Malley

The article is based on qualitative research conducted in the UK and the USA by three critical social field researchers drawn to work with young people in participative ways. The work was grounded in the researchers' commitments to researching to "make a ... see more

Jean Rath

This article explores issues of representation and the development of participatory practices in the context of researching women's experiences of training to be rape crisis counselors. In moving between context and methods, research generated poetry, par... see more

Sylvia Lenz

The reinstatement of democracy in Argentina in 1983 was accompanied by the re-opening of channels for political participation, as well as the creation of spaces for civil participation, such as NGOs and initiatives of the Catholic Church, which had been c... see more

Monika Götsch,Sabine Klinger,Andreas Thiesen

Participatory methods aim to democratize and critique societies. However, their understanding of democracy has never been questioned. It is crucial to undertake such an analysis in order to fullyrecognize the critical potential of research  employing... see more

Katherine M. Boydell,Brenda M. Gladstone,Tiziana Volpe,Brooke Allemang,Elaine Stasiulis

The use of arts-based research is shifting our understanding of what counts as evidence and highlights the complexity and multidimensionality involved in creating new knowledge. A scoping review of arts-based health research was undertaken to identify the... see more

James Cresswell,Allison Hawn

This article seeks to enrich qualitative analysis by way of showing how Erving GOFFMAN's work can be enhanced by interfacing it with Mikhail BAKHTIN. The goal is to inspire an approach to the interpretation of human action that highlights phenomenological... see more

Nelly Elias,Julia Lerner

This research explores the professional and life experiences of a Russian-speaking immigrant journalist who relocates herself in Israel, within the new professional and cultural environment. She engages intensively in decoding and interpreting her new soc... see more

Michael Frei,Bernhard Grimmer,Konrad Michel,Ladislav Valach,Brigitte Boothe

The main risk factor for suicide is the attempt to do. It boosts the risk of further attempts and heightens the risk of subsequent suicide considerably. We know the rate of suicide attempters willing to attend even an aftercare appointment to be  low... see more

Thomas Hillman

This article examines the role of materials in education by investigating the inclusion of a handheld digital technology in mathematics classrooms. By drawing on activity theory to conceptualize learning with technology and Actor-Network theory to underst... see more

Ping-Chun Hsiung

Over the past decades, scholarly interest has led to publications on the practices and development of qualitative research (QR) in countries outside of the Anglo-American core. Much of the writing is descriptive, providing an overview of the QR path and d... see more

Ute Karl

With the help of conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis, an examination is presented of how and for what practical purposes gendered categorizations are interactively produced and become relevant in practices of talk-in-interaction i... see more

Marisa Ponti

Uncovering the underlying order in organizational change narratives to determine event causalities is a long-standing methodological problem. The order emerged within a narrative from the reconstruction of sequences of events can be taken as evidence of t... see more

Dietmar Rost

The perceptions and interpretations of soldiers participating in combat are not just biographically important; they do not only regard their subjective handling of that experience. Rather, they immediately interact with the use of collective violence in w... see more

Ann-Mari Sellerberg,Vesa Leppänen

On the macro level, bankruptcies are an intrinsic part of market economies and result in restructurings of companies and markets. On the micro level, bankrupt entrepreneurs are temporarily excluded from the market and forced to reorganize their understand... see more

Audra Skukauskaite

This article presents a reflexive analysis of two transcripts of an open-ended interview and argues for transparency in transcribing processes and outcomes. By analyzing ways in which a researcher's theories become consequential in producing and using tra... see more

Patricia Mariel Sorribas,Silvina Alejandra Brussino

Presented in this article are theoretical and methodological links between framing (as developed by Erving GOFFMAN in his book "Frame Analysis", 2006 [1974]) and other methodologies used in the study of communication (e.g., critical discourse analysis, ne... see more

Susan Thieme

Researchers commonly disseminate their research findings in academic papers or books that have a selected and limited target audience. A potential method for disseminating the information other than the traditional academic is through film, but this means... see more

Vanessa Garcia Diaz

The return of the subject in the social sciences reflects growing interest in the study of subjectivity. This refers to opportunities for individuals to make meaning of their lives within the institutions of society. MERRIL and WEST’s text serves as a ref... see more

Reinhard Messerschmidt

"Discourse Analysis Meets Governmentality Research," edited by Johannes ANGERMÜLLER and Silke VAN DYK, presents the contributions of the eponymous workshop held at the University of Jena in 2009. With this anthology, readers will gain substantiated insig... see more

Rudolf Schmitt

KRUSE, BIESEL and SCHMIEDER present an analysis of metaphors in line with the cognitive metaphor theory of LAKOFF and JOHNSON, situating these in a "basic reconstructive procedure. The presentation of this concept is accompanied by a comparison with eight... see more

Audra Skukauskaite,Judith L. Green

Building on Günter MEY's (2000, para. 2) argument that "reviews should help to promote additional perspectives … and to open up new scientific discourses," in this essay review of Carol GRBICH's (2007) "Qualitative Data Analysis," we present an approach t... see more

Jenny Weggen

The book "Dialogic Introspection. A Group-based Method to Explore Personal Experience by Self-observation" describes the rediscovery and development of an almost forgotten qualitative method in the empirical toolbox of psychology and the social sciences. ... see more

Alexa Maria Kunz,Tilo Grenz,Paul Eisewicht

The 3. Fulda Convention on Fieldwork—essentially based around the concept of lifeworld analytical ethnography developed by Anne HONER—provided a broad insight into recent avenues and challenges in ethnographic research. The reporting team consisted of thr... see more

Claudia Scheid,Johannes Twardella

Each year the Association of Objective Hermeneutics organizes a conference during which projects and/or findings of researchers working with the objective hermeneutics method are presented and discussed. In this year's session, the main focus was on the s... see more