Researching Society and Culture

Just starting out with social research? With contributions from experts across the social sciences, this book equips you with the tools for successfully investigating society and culture.

It shows you how to prepare for research, generate and analyse data, and present your findings. Balancing theory with practice, it covers foundational concepts in methods and methodology alongside contemporary developments.

This radically updated new edition:

• Sees all chapters fully rewritten in a friendly, accessible style;
• Offers additional chapters on participatory research and online ’big’ data;
• Includes multiple case studies of real-world research from across the globe in every chapter;
• Celebrates the dynamic, reflexive nature of research as engagement with the world.

Clive Seale has been Professor of Sociology (or Medical Sociology) at Goldsmiths and Queen Mary’s (both University of London) and Brunel University. His work has concerned communication in health care and death in modern society. He has published extensively on research methods. His books include Constructing Death: the sociology of dying and bereavement (Cambridge University Press, 1998), The Quality of Qualitative Research (Sage, 1999), Media and Health (Sage, 2003) and Gender and the Language of Illness (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010, with Jonathan Charteris-Black). Recently, he has turned to fiction, publishing a novel, Interrogating Ellie (Cloiff Books, 2015) using the pen name Julian Gray. He is currently writing another novel.

Carol Rivas is an associate professor in Social Policy and Programme Evaluation in the Social Research Institute at University College London. For more than 30 years she has undertaken research on chronic health conditions and disabilities, abuse, and vulnerable populations. This has encompassed a range of conditions (e.g. multiple sclerosis, hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndromes, diabetes, partner abuse, depression, developmental disorders, cancer), and a variety of methods, from Big Data analyses through conversation analysis to small qualitative explorations. She is particularly interested in the intersection of health with race, ethnicity and migrant status. She currently leads on major research on the intersections of ethnicity, disability or chronic conditions, and the pandemic, including considerations of Long Covid and of vaccine uptake. Her research aims to develop practical and theoretical understandings of vulnerability and social interaction to use with linked research outputs to support instrumental changes in policy and practice. She has won several awards, particularly for her participatory methods. Carol also teaches courses on methods and on the use of evidence in policy and practice at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She has edited a special issue on disability for the journal Evidence and Policy and has written a number of textbook chapters, for example for Researching Society and Culture, the Sage Handbook of Interview Research (2012 ed), and Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors Past, Present and Future, as well as publications in academic journals. She sits on a UK National Institutes of Health Research Commissioned and Researcher Led Funding panel. She holds a doctorate in medical sociology from Queen Mary University of London, a master’s in Cognitive Neuropsychology from Birkbeck University London, and a bachelor’s degree in zoology (brain and behaviour) from Queen Mary University of London.