Angelo Flynn - Transforming Research Methods in the Social Sciences: Case Studies From South Africa

Transforming
Research Methods
in the Social Sciences

Case Studies From South Africa

Case Studies from South Africa

EDITORS Sumaya LaherAngelo FynnSherianne Kramer

Published in South Africa by:

Wits University Press

1 Jan Smuts Avenue

Johannesburg 2001

www.witspress.co.za

Compilation Editors 2019

Chapters Individual contributors 2019

Published edition Wits University Press 2019

Images and figures Copyright holders

First published 2019

http://dx.doi.org.10.18772/22019032750

978-1-77614-275-0 (Paperback)

978-1-77614-355-9 (Web PDF)

978-1-77614-356-6 (EPUB)

978-1-77614-357-3 (Mobi)

978-1-77614-276-7 (Open Access PDF)

978-1-77614-460-0 (Hardback)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher, except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act, Act 98 of 1978.

All images remain the property of the copyright holders. The publishers gratefully acknowledge the publishers, institutions and individuals referenced in captions for the use of images. Every effort has been made to locate the original copyright holders of the images reproduced here; please contact Wits University Press in case of any omissions or errors.

This book is freely available through the OAPEN library (www.oapen.org) under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 Creative Commons License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

The publication of this volume was made possible by funding from the Psychological Society of South Africa, the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of South Africa.

Project manager: Inga Norenius

Copyeditor: Lee Smith

Proofreader: Lisa Compton

Indexer: Tessa Botha

Cover design: Hothouse

Typesetter: MPS

Typeset in 9 point Stone Serif Std

This book was one of the more unusual undertakings made in our collective academic careers. The project to produce the book stemmed from a sense of frustration at the systematic restrictions to knowledge produced within the global South context. The book also has its roots in our experiences as emerging researchers and as the supervisors of emerging researchers where the gap between the manicured presentation of results in journal articles and the neat, systematic processes described in textbooks was often too difficult to bridge. From multiple conversations with other scholars, students and researchers in the social sciences, we had the sense that there was a need for a text that was freely available and demonstrated the realities of conducting specific forms of research in the global South context, one that would present original research conducted in our local context through the lens of methods.

Social science methods cover a wide variety of ontological, epistemological and political approaches. There have been a number of attempts over the years to create some form of taxonomy for the social sciences. However, the field continues to grow and evolve, generating new approaches and adapting existing approaches. Consequently, trying to structure a book seeking to present the scope of social sciences was particularly challenging. In this book, we have resorted to using the traditional frames of quantitative, qualitative and transformative methods to attempt to thematically group the various research approaches covered. However, the presentation of the chapters should not be viewed as a taxonomy for social sciences as many of them can and do cross the conceptual boundaries we have created to structure it. This book might be criticised for being uneven or for its inconsistent register across the various chapters. However, the variation between social science methods in practice represents a diversity of voices and approaches that are all best conveyed within the styles pertaining to their own research fields and methodological genres. We hope that this book adequately and authentically represents this diversity in the chapters selected.

While we tried to cover a broad array of approaches within the book, we do not claim that it is comprehensive or definitive. Rather, we see it as the first step in documenting and cataloguing the diversity of established and emerging approaches within the global South context. This book is simply the introductory chapter to, we hope, a larger body of work that will systematically transform how social science research is conducted within the global South. The final chapter of the book in particular provides a discussion of emerging trends that hold promise for the future of the social sciences, as well as critical issues we view as priorities for the field in general.

The availability of this book as open access also speaks to the future of knowledge production and dissemination. The ideal of freely accessible knowledge is gaining momentum across multiple social sectors, particularly in academia. The open access movements are discussed in detail in the first chapter of this book. However, free to the reader does not equate to free to produce. The popular adage there is no such thing as a free lunch can be seen as one of the primary inhibitors of widely produced open access work. The production of scholarly texts is time intensive and requires specialist knowledge acquired through years of experience by individuals. The costs are often carried by funders, institutions of higher education and government. We were prepared to undertake an extensive campaign aimed at lobbying academics, researchers and reviewers to freely give up their time, intellectual property and energy to work with us on this project. However, we were more than pleasantly surprised at the groundswell of support from a variety of established scholars who endorsed the idea of broadening access to knowledge within the global South. For this we are immensely grateful and humbled.

We hope that you will enjoy this book with its tapestry of case studies illustrating the various contexts within which social science research is produced. More so, we hope that the innovative methods used will inspire you to conduct your own research going forward.