Methodological innovations to meet 21st Century societal challenges
Registration is now open for this joint conference organised by the Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research and methods@manchester.
Date: 10 June 2019
Time: 9am-5pm
Fee: full day fee of £5 postgrad students or £10 non-postgrad students/other
Registration closes: 31 May 2019
Location: Roscoe Building, The University of Manchester, UK, M13 9PL
Conference outline
The conference is multi-disciplinary and focuses on methodological innovation in a wide range of fields including sociology, economics, criminology, health, and geography. The methods showcased are diverse and range from new automated approaches to dealing with large scale ‘noisy’ forms of big data to more personalised strategies that centre on co-production and citizen involvement. A key theme of the conference is highlighting methodological innovation across the stages of the research process, i.e. from initial research design to data collection, the use of extant data sources, analysis, the presentation and dissemination of results, and engaging with the public.
Structure to the day
The morning will begin with a keynote presentation, ‘Reflections on Methodological innovation: Challenges and opportunities’ from Professor Jane Elliott, University of Exeter.
In the afternoon, Dr Tom Smith, Managing Director of the new ONS Data Science Campus will deliver his keynote, ‘New forms of data for official statistics’.
The afternoon will provide two optional activities for attendees, which will be confirmed once conference registration closes on 31 May 2019:
- A data hackathon organised by the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM). In the hack, those participating will be given a set of datasets and asked to perform an analysis which requires information from some of the datasets. The datasets are imperfect and participants will have to manage those imperfections.
- A screening of a documentary film of an arts-based project about the process of recovery from substance use introduced by Professor Amanda Ravetz, Manchester Metropolitan University.
Presentations throughout the day
Presentations will take place in concurrent sessions that will run across the whole day. Presenters and paper titles are listed below:
- Alastair Roy - A critical discussion of the use of film in participatory research projects with homeless young people: an international case-case based analysis
- Charlotte De Kock - Monitoring migration-related indicators in European drug treatment: Identifying pitfalls and challenges in registration, data collection and database coupling methods
- Emma Heron - Listening Matters!: The Challenge of Genuine Listening in a Higher Education Setting for the Purpose of Change
- Hanako Smith - Experience Sampling Method in a Living Labs approach: How to connect with millennials in a real-world setting
- Jerome Turner - The Community Panel method: working collaboratively with participants in Facebook Groups
- Josephine Biglin – 'Participatory Epistemology and Non-representational Theory: Initial Experiences of Working with Migrant Populations
- Karina Williams - ONS social media analysis of YouTube data
- Martin Greenwood – Reading the signals: Capturing the meanings of pedestrian crossings practice in Manchester using participant observation and dual-perspective GoPro ethnography
- Matthew Sanderson - Can existing, cross-sectoral community engagements better inform the development of power network design and planning?
- Michelle Van Impe - What do we want and where are we now? Critical methodological reflections on participatory action research with people who use illegal drugs
- Miriam Trzeciak - ‘Tell us something about yourself, too’ – Reflections on Collaborative Research as a Reflexive Tool for Social Research.
- Oana Petcu – What features impact engagement with missing people appeals on twitter?
- Peter Barbrook-Johnson - Participatory Systems Mapping for understanding complex societal issues
- Peter Smyth - Processing Large Datasets using Columnar Datastores on the Desktop
- Ratna Ghosh - A reflexive account of participatory video action research: The stories that middle-class women in urban India don’t want to share
- Rosalind Edwards - Big data, qualitative style: a breadth-and-depth method for working with large amounts of secondary qualitative data
- Sally Ruth Fergusson-Wormley - “Embedding the voice” – Co-producing a PhD
- Jane Elliot - Reflections on Methodological innovation: Challenges and Opportunities
- Tom Smith - New light on old problems: Novel data sources and official statistics
Registering for the event
This is a not-for-profit conference. We are making a small charge to attendees as a contribution to some of the costs.
Please note registration is now closed for this event.