FREEDOM OF INFORMATION AND SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH DESIGN
This multidisciplinary volume demonstrates how Freedom of Information (FOI) law and processes can contribute to social science research design across sociology, criminology, political science, anthropology, journalism and education. Comparing the use of FOI in research design across the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Canada and South Africa, it provides readers with resources to carry out FOI requests and considers the influence such requests can have on debates within multiple disciplines. In addition to exploring how scholars can use FOI disclosures in conjunction with interview data, archival data and other datasets, this collection explains how researchers can systematically analyse FOI disclosures. Considering the challenges and dilemmas in using FOI processes in research, it examines the reasons why many scholars continue to rely on more easily accessible data, when much of the real work of governance, the more clandestine but consequential decisions and policy moves made by government officials, can only be accessed using FOI requests.
Kevin Walby is Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Winnipeg, Canada. He is the author of Touching Encounters: Sex, Work and Male-for-Male Internet Escorting and the co-author of Municipal Corporate Security in International Context as well as A Criminology of Policing and Security Frontiers. He is the co-editor of Access to Information and Social Justice: Critical Research Strategies for Journalists, Scholars and Activists; Brokering Access: Power, Politics and Freedom of Information Process in Canada; The Handbook of Prison Tourism; Corporatizing Canada: Making Business Out of Public Service; National Security, Surveillance, and Terror: Canada and Australia in Comparative Perspective; Policing Cities: Urban Securitization and Regulation in a 21st Century World and Corporate Security in the 21st Century: Theory and Practice in International Perspective. He is co-editor of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons.
Alex Luscombe is a PhD Candidate in criminology at the University of Toronto, Canada. He has published widely on issues of policing, corruption, secrecy and Freedom of Information law in Canada and beyond. His past research has appeared in Social Forces, British Journal of Criminology, Sociology, International Political Sociology, Canadian Journal of Criminology & Criminal Justice, Policing & Society, Criminology & Criminal Justice, as well as a number of other academic journals and edited volumes. He serves on the editorial board of Criminological Highlights, a University of Toronto publication aimed at providing criminal justice practitioners with an accessible overview of recent criminological research. He is also a Junior Fellow at the University of Torontos Massey College.
Routledge Advances in Research Methods
Dialectics, Power and Knowledge Construction in Qualitative Research
Beyond Dichotomy
Adital Ben-Ari and Guy Enosh
Researching Social Problems
Edited by Amir Marvasti and A. Javier Trevio
Action Research in a Relational Perspective
Dialogue, Reflexivity, Power and Ethics
Edited by Lone Hersted, Ottar Ness and Sren Frimann
Situated Writing as Theory and Method
The Untimely Academic Novella
Mona Livholts
Foundations and Practice of Research
Adventures with Dooyeweerds Philosophy
Andrew Basden
Gambling, Losses and Self-Esteem
An Interactionist Approach to the Betting Shop
Cormac Mc Namara
Institutional Ethnography in the Nordic Region
Edited by Rebecca W. B. Lund and Ann Christin E. Nilsen
Freedom of Information and Social Science Research Design
Edited by Kevin Walby and Alex Luscombe
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Routledge-Advances-in-Research-Methods/book-series/RARM
First published 2020
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2020 selection and editorial matter, Kevin Walby and Alex Luscombe; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Kevin Walby and Alex Luscombe to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN: 978-1-138-34573-7 (hbk)
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ISBN: 978-0-429-43771-7 (ebk)
Dr. Hannah Bows is an Assistant Professor in Criminal Law at Durham Law School (Durham University). Her research spans the areas of violence, gender and ageing. Her recent research includes studies examining homicide and sexual offences against people aged 60 and over in the UK and a current project analysing stalking. She is the incoming Chair of the British Society of Criminology Victims Network and founder of the International Network for Research into Violence Against Older Women.
Ciara Bracken-Roche is an SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Ottawa. Her primary research programme analyses the contribution of unmanned aerial systems to the rapid expansion of security, policing and commercial surveillance in Canada. Her research agenda focuses on the relationship between governance and technology, and the social implications of technocratic governmentality. Her work has been published in journals such as Geopolitics, Geographica Helvetica, Feminist Journal of Art and Digital Culture and the Journal of Unmanned Systems, in addition to numerous book chapters and policy reports. Bracken-Roche completed her PhD in the Department of Sociology at Queens University in 2017, funded by the SSHRC Talent Program. She completed her MA (Politics) at the University of Warwick and her BSc (International Relations) at the University of Toronto. Bracken-Roche also has a long history of service within her academic communities, most recently founding a Postdoctoral Association at the University of Ottawa, which has secured benefits and employee status for Postdoctoral Fellows.
John R. Campbell is Reader in Sociology and Anthropology at University of London. Following anthropological research on international development in Africa, John Campbell has undertaken research on war, refugees and statelessness in the Horn of Africa and he has written on asylum-related litigation in British courts. The issues in this paper emerged from recent work he has undertaken including
