Social Studies of Social Science: A Working Bibliography

The social sciences are currently going through a reflexive phase, one marked by the appearance of a wave of studies which approach their disciplines’ own methods and research practices as their empirical subject matter. Driven partly by a growing interest in knowledge production and partly by a desire to make the social sciences ‘fit-for-purpose’ in the digital era, these studies seek to reinvigorate debates around methods by treating them as embedded social and cultural phenomena with their own distinctive biographical trajectories – or “social lives”. Empirical studies of social scientific work and the role of methods within it, however, remain relatively scarce. There are several reasons for this but, for one thing, it can be difficult to find examples of how such studies might be undertaken. This contribution draws together a literature scattered across various social science disciplines and their sub-fields in which social science methods have been studied empirically. We hope this working bibliography will provide a useful resource for those who wish to undertake such studies in the future. We also hope to show that the more recent literature can be connected to, and stands to be informed by, a much broader literature. We do not pretend that our bibliography is complete and comprehensive but we do think it represents a starting point for those who wish to pursue these issues for themselves

News Interviews: Clayman and Heritage’s The News Interview

News interviews: Clayman and Heritage’s ‘The News Interview

A Comparison of Qualitative and Quantitative Reasoning in the ESRC's National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM): Research Methods in Practice

Within the social sciences, ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ approaches are commonly differentiated in terms of official statements of their respective methods. The goal of this project was to investigate how these differences play out in practice. Although the two chosen Nodes, BIAS and Realities, could not be said to be entirely typical of either quantitative or qualitative approaches, they take avowedly different methodological stances and therefore served as case studies to consider both similarities and differences in their methodological practices. The project was thus a largely unprecedented attempt to examine social science’s own research practices sociologically

Research with Numbers

In this chapter we review Garfinkel’s work on method in the social sciences, focusing specifically on research with numbers. Ethnomethodology has had a vexed relationship with the social sciences and Garfinkel’s remarks on sociology’s methods have often been presented as a skeptical attack on the very possibility of social research. Ethnomethodology has also frequently been portrayed as being particularly critical of quantitative research, and has sometimes been taken to argue for qualitative methods as an alternative to quantitative methods. We argue that these readings of Garfinkel and ethnomethodology miss the mark. With increasing numbers of contemporary researchers coming back to themes first broached by Garfinkel, this is an ideal moment to revisit Garfinkel’s position. We show that rather than simply critiquing quantitative methods, ethnomethodology offers an alternate orientation to practices of quantification, since ethnomethodology is interested in quantification as practiced. Drawing together various strands in Garfinkel’s work on method across his career and a small field study of our own, we explore ethnomethodology’s respecification of quantification as number work