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This paper reflects on the value of diary methods in the context of a qualitative, longitudinal narrative inquiry exploring the higher education decision-making of further education students in England. Event-based diaries were used alongside interviews and focus groups over a 14-month period to gain in-depth insights into the reasons and influences informing their decision-making trajectories. I explore the challenges, successful approaches and advantages of employing diary methods with young people in this context. Challenges consisted of maintaining participant engagement, which was overcome by combining methods and incorporating a reactive co-participatory element. Yet, a number of advantages emerged from participants' engagement with diary keeping which enhanced the richness of the data; this inspired deeper reflections on decision-making and influences and provided a private space for participants to disclose personal difficulties that could not be obtained via interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Audio recording interviews, focus groups, and naturally occurring interactions have been utilised by social researchers for decades. Yet, the use of audio recordings as a tool to elicit participant responses has received less attention in social science research. This is despite heightened interest in non-traditional techniques such as the use of visual methodologies, and arts-based methods. In this article, I describe how I advanced a known method, vignettes, into an audio narrative to explore perceptions of sex work. This article reports on the methodological rationale for the novel use of audio vignettes, and the capacity they have for memory retrieval, eliciting reflections on lived experiences, and for providing richer attitudinal data. By drawing on 'accessibility theory', this article argues that audio vignettes are a powerful elicitor of attitudes. Furthermore, I claim that audio methods as I define them, can enhance the social scientists' toolkit and that, what I term 'audio sociology' needs further development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In shifting environments common to peace and conflict research, methodological grounding is rooted in the fluctuating roles undertaken by the researcher through time and space as one seeks a worldview that is experienced by research participants. This article introduces a side-by-side methodological approach, which developed through research of cross-community interaction amongst ice hockey supporters in Belfast. Influenced by qualitative research that sought to access local voices, this article moves from conceptual guidance and planning into the stands of the SSE Arena, where interviews were conducted with the person in the seat beside the researcher during ice hockey games. In doing so, this immersive methodology offers a contribution to unearthing unheard voices in this oft-studied region through the opportunity to make connection that was unscripted, aided by the informality of the research setting and the limited face-to-face interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The call to move beyond binary conceptualizations of gender is not new, and yet, this categorical and contrastive approach to gender analysis remains common, particularly in health sciences. It has been posited that the problem of gender dualism rests partially in the minimal interplay between theory and method. Drawing on our experiences during a qualitative study of men's and women's involvement in cardiac rehabilitation, this article provides an account of the analytic and reflexive challenges of conducting research on gender and health and explores how the careful use of theory, specifically Bourdieu's theory of practice, can facilitate a departure from narrow gender binaries. The analysis presented in this article adds to methodological writings on gender and health, offering a theory-driven process to help researchers address the fluidity of gender as lived and negotiated in the everyday social and material circumstances of men and women, particularly during times of illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Google Docs is a widely used online word processing software. Despite its broad popularity in business and education, Google Docs is under-utilised as a tool to facilitate qualitative interviews within research. In this article, we reflect on our experiences as two PhDs using Google Docs to conduct synchronous, online, written interviews. We present two case studies, which, to our knowledge, are the first to utilise Google Docs to conduct web-based written interviews. In doing so, we (a) outline the development and implementation of the methodology, (b) highlight the key themes we identified when considering the benefits and challenges of conducting interviews using this technology and (c) discuss possible future uses of the methodology. We argue that synchronous web-based written interviews via Google Docs offer unprecedented opportunities for qualitative research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we rethink the ways that analysis within narrative research might occur based on the topic being studied and provide an example using the Afro-Brazilian martial art capoeira. Locating our work at the intersection of Derridean freeplay and the spirit of play present in the Afro-Brazilian martial art capoeira, we reconceive of the ways that narratives may be constructed, and suggest that the topic under study, capoeira, may actually become an analytic. This piece offers one of many potential directions for rethinking analysis of narrative data and representing participant experiences and suggests blurring lines between content and method of analysis. While our own analysis occurs using play as it appears in capoeira, we suggest that any number of research topics may be used to inform the ways that we analyze data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates data reuse or the secondary analysis of qualitative data, specifically video records of practice in education, which are used to study the complex cognitive, social, and logistical issues involved in teaching and learning processes. It examines reuse through the lens of the invisibilities experienced by educational researchers who perform secondary analysis on video records of practice. Drawing on 22 in-depth interviews with educational researchers, we examine how they conceptualize secondary analysis of qualitative video data and cope with invisibilities in the data. For example, knowing the original research question was not sufficient: reusers needed to understand more about the intentionality of the data producer. They also sought more information on the reflexivity of the original researcher and how this influenced data production. Additionally, reusers discussed the creation of evidence from the video during secondary analysis as teaching and learning themselves entail invisible processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]