Creative Research Methods 2e. Kara, Helen
Helen Kara is the author of Research and Evaluation for Busy Students and Practitioners: A Time-Saving Guide (Policy Press, 2nd edn, 2017) and Research Ethics in the Real World: Euro-Western and Indigenous Perspectives (Policy Press, 2018). Helen is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Manchester, and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.
Kenneth J. Gergen and Mary M. Gergen
This is an important book, with resounding implications for the social sciences and for cultural life more generally. In its transformative message, author Helen Kara plots a path for social scientists to resist the strangulating demands of a longstanding view of research, and become creators of desired futures. For almost a century the social sciences have been dominated by a conception of research in which carefully controlled and systematic observation provided the path to knowledge. Such a view presumes the fixed nature of the subject matter, and upholds methods that prevent the contamination of knowledge by potential prejudices, especially those of the researchers themselves. Until recent years virtually all books on research methods sustained this conception of knowledge. Or, one might say, books on methods functioned much like marching orders designed to keep the troops in line.
Times have changed, and most social scientists have now come to understand the way knowledgeable propositions are constructed within various scientific enclaves, carrying with them myriad assumptions and values that have no warrant save the negotiated realities of the groups themselves. It is this realisation that has led not only to wide-ranging critiques of the limitations of traditional empirical methods (for example, experimentation, measurement, statistical analysis), but to an enormous flowering of qualitative methods. A new range of handbooks has emerged during the 2010s, offering a wide and exciting range of qualitative methods of enquiry.
Yet, in the present work Helen Kara presses further. She invites researchers to create their practices. Rather than offering endless lists and rationales for what a particular method – qualitative or quantitative – should and should not do, she invites the researcher to deliberate, to imagine and to create. The major question is what the researcher wishes to accomplish: what is worth doing, who is helped or hurt by the research and what ethical and political issues are relevant. Here is a bold invitation for researchers to move beyond the available cookbooks, to mobilise their talents, insights and passions and to create the means to valued ends. In this latest volume Kara explores new territories, capturing the current waves of interest in non-Western approaches to discovery, to embodied research and gendered concerns. She integrates technological advances and internet exploration, as well as providing copious illustrations of culturally significant research. It is an exciting adventure to explore these works from creative researchers around the world. We believe this book could motivate even the most timid researcher to try something new.
So many people have helped with the creation of this book that I can’t name them all. Inspiration and ideas have come from one-off conversations on buses and at conferences; from ongoing discussions with members of the UK’s Social Research Association, the British Library’s social science department and the members of the Arts & Sciences Researchers Forum at Cambridge University; as well as from innumerable exchanges on Twitter. I’m going to thank as many people as I can, but if you should be in here and I’ve left you out – well, that will be the first of the mistakes in this book which are, of course, all my own responsibility.
For specific advice on quantitative methods, I’d like to thank Andrea Finney from the School of Geographical Sciences at Bristol University, and Patten Smith and Chris Perry from Ipsos MORI. I’m grateful to Elizabeth Rodriguez, aka @LibbyBlog, for pointing me to the crocheted model of hyperbolic geometry. Phil M. Jones, lecturer in policing at Derby University, was invaluable in assisting my thinking for the second edition.
Special thanks for expert advice to Radhika Holmström, who helped with the section about working with the mainstream media, and to Caroline Beavon, who helped with the presentation chapter.
I am very grateful to three artist/researchers and endlessly patient sounding-boards: Carol Burns, Su Connan and Anne-Louise Denyer. Also to Nick Dixon, who pointed me to the work of David Edwards, which I wouldn’t otherwise have found, and who deserves extra special thanks for listening to me go on and on about the first edition of this book for months and months. Online and other resources were provided by Rosalind Edwards, Hazel Larkin, Margy MacMillan, Amanda Taylor, Pat Thomson and other excellent tweeps. Janet Salmons has been enormously supportive from across the Atlantic.
I’m really grateful to Leigh Forbes for moral and technical support. Also to Rob Macmillan of the Third Sector Research Centre, University of Birmingham, for ongoing support and for straightening out some of my tangled ideas about theory. And to Annette Markham of Aarhus University for taking an interest purely on the basis of a slightly cheeky e-mail, and passing on some really helpful information.
The first edition of this book alerted Richard Phillips, geographer extraordinaire from Sheffield University, to my existence. We are now co-conspirators in writing, thinking and occasional wine drinking. His fingerprints are all over this second edition; invisible to you, perhaps, but highly visible to me. I am grateful to him for asking me to work with him (and paying!), influencing my writing and thinking in positive ways and providing regular cerebral and physical sustenance in Sheffield and London.
I am also very grateful for the help and support of colleagues at the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM), where I was a Visiting Fellow from 2015 to 2019, and at the University of Manchester, where I have been an Honorary Senior Research Fellow since 2019. In particular, Rosalind Edwards at NCRM and Lisa Williams at Manchester have been unfailing in their support for my work.
My family are hugely supportive: Mark Miller, Julie Miller, Rosalind Round, Jamie Round, Dave Round, Clare Miller, David Miller, Vicki Miller, Bob Denyer, Lauren Denyer, Marie-Claire Denyer, John McCormack, Anne-Louise Denyer, Lowell Black and Aaron Stevenson have all provided encouragement and love.
My friends, too, have been loving, supportive and encouraging. In particular: Ian Bramley and Kevin Turner, Gilly and Dave Brownhill, Carol Burns, Zoë Clarke, Su Connan, Anne and Mike Cummins, Nick Dixon, Leigh Forbes, Sue Guiney, Radhika Holmström, Sarah-May Matthews, Lucy Pickering, Clare Sudbery and AllyFogg, Wayne Thexton and Katy Vigurs.
My partner, Nik Holmes, has helped far more than he realises, by making my life run smoothly and happily in a hundred different ways, such as fixing computer glitches, cooking delicious dinners and giving the best hugs.
This book is immeasurably better as a result of input from four proposal reviewers and especially two typescript reviewers for the first edition, and four proposal reviewers and especially three typescript reviewers for the second edition. All did their job perfectly, praising the good bits and gently pointing out where and how improvements could be made.
Many of the staff at Policy Press helped with the first edition, particularly Ali Shaw, Julia Mortimer, Emily Watt, Victoria Pittman, Laura Vickers, Dave Worth, Jo Morton, Kathryn King, Rebecca Megson and Helen Cook. For the second edition at Policy Press, Catherine Gray deserves special thanks for getting it off the ground and helping me figure out the new structure; Philippa Grand for expert handling of the