Methodological Imaginations

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xviii

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2. Surrealism, Mass-Observation and Researching Imagination

   • Jenny Shaw

   Pages 1-16

3. Imagining the Community: Some Reflections on the Community Study as a Method

   • Geoff Payne

   Pages 17-33

4. Researching Moving Targets: Using Diaries to Explore Supply Teachers’ Lives

   • Marlene Morrison, Sheila Galloway

   Pages 34-57

5. Uncovering Key Aspects of Experience: The Use of In-depth Interviews in a Study of Women Returners to Education

   • Susan Smith

   Pages 58-74

6. Every Picture ‘Tells a Story’: Uses of the Visual in Sociological Research

   • Barbara Harrison

   Pages 75-94

7. Visual Imagery and the Iconography of the Social World: Some Considerations of History, Art and Problems for Sociological Research

   • Anthony Pryce

   Pages 95-111

8. Ethnography, Ethnicity and Work: Unpacking the West Midlands Clothing Industry

   • Monder Ram

   Pages 112-130

9. Emotional Labour and Qualitative Research: How I Learned Not to Laugh or Cry in the Field

   • Karen Ramsay

   Pages 131-146

10. The Research Process: Context, Autonomy and Audience

    • Geoff Cooper, Steve Woolgar

    Pages 147-163

11. Gender, Power and Epistemology: Can Men Know Feminist Truths?

    • A. Mark Liddle

    Pages 164-184

12. Doing What Comes Naturally? Standpoint Epistemology, Critical Social Research and the Politics of Identity

    • Paul Connolly

    Pages 185-199

13. Back Matter

    Pages 200-204

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This book brings together a collection of essays which look creatively and imaginatively at issues of research methods and methodology in sociology. Some papers critically revisit and redefine techniques such as the classic community study, the use of diaries, photography and art, others examine the need for reflexivity in the research process and the epistemological issues arising from being a researcher in administrative and political contexts. The diversity of research approaches discussed in this reader should make it an important contribution to research methods teaching for undergraduate and graduate students of sociology.

• community
• emotion
• feminism
• gender
• identity
• interview
• methodology
• methods
• Nation
• politics
• qualitative research
• social research
• sociology

• Division of Sociology, South Bank University, London, UK

  E. Stina Lyon

• Department of Sociology, University of Essex, Colchester, UK

  Joan Busfield

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