Setting Up Targeted Research Interviews: A Primer for Students and New Interviewers

This article analyzes key strategic considerations for setting up targeted research interviews, including human subjects and Institutional Review Board requirements, approaching respondents, the medium of contact, using technology, cultural conceptions of time and commitment, using networks, wading through bureaucracies, and watching for warning signs. By making these considerations explicit and conscious, we can better specify how to gain interviews for our research and how to ethically approach this task. This analysis will be most useful as a pedagogical explanation for students and for scholars newly approaching interviewing

Stable Conflict in the San Francisco Homeless Policy Field

This article combines network analysis and cognitive frame analysis to explain the institutionalization of homeless politics in San Francisco into a stasis of organized stable conflict. The persistence of stable conflict within the San Francisco homeless policy field brings into question the widespread notion within sociology that the stable ordering of a social field or institutional arena emerges when a group of incumbents or elites comes to dominate that arena and impose their conception of the world onto it. The San Francisco homeless policy field shows that even in the absence of a dominant organizing conception of the world, stable order within an institutional arena can still be achieved through a complex equilibrium of ideas, relationships, power, and resources

Material and Spiritual Conceptions of Development: A framework of ideal types

By many accounts a global revival of religion is afoot – not simply a revival of individual religious belief, but of the public role of religion. Correspondingly, development scholars and practitioners have increasingly recognized that we must reconsider the meaning of national development in light of religious worldviews. However, scholars have yet to fashion an empirically grounded, synthetic framework for understanding the range of approaches to development, both material and spiritual, that are at play in the world today. This paper presents such a framework, drawing on 200 interviews with development practitioners sampled from across 9 countries in the global south

Stable Conflict in the San Francisco Homeless Policy Field

This article combines network analysis and cognitive frame analysis to explain the institutionalization of homeless politics in San Francisco into a stasis of organized stable conflict. The persistence of stable conflict within the San Francisco homeless policy field brings into question the widespread notion within sociology that the stable ordering of a social field or institutional arena emerges when a group of incumbents or elites comes to dominate that arena and impose their conception of the world onto it. The San Francisco homeless policy field shows that even in the absence of a dominant organizing conception of the world, stable order within an institutional arena can still be achieved through a complex equilibrium of ideas, relationships, power, and resources