Understanding Social Research

In 1991 the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) published Postgraduate Training Guidelines. Throughout the document emphasis was placed on the need for universities to make postgraduate research students aware of the methodological issues that affect their work. This book explores the relationship between knowledge, methodology and research practice across the broad spectrum of the social sciences, in language that is accessible to researchers at all levels of their research careers. The book explores the diversity of practice and methodology, and suggests that this diversity and variety of methodology and disciplinary focus are signs of the sophistication and complexity of the processes of social research