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- New contexts, new challenges: revisiting equal opportunities, particularism, and ethnic relations
by Malcolm Harrison - Comments on 'New contexts, new challenges: revisiting equal opportunities, particularism, and ethnic relations' by Malcolm Harrison
by Paul Watt, Ludi Simpson, Harris Beider and A. Sule Özüekren - Jobs for communities: does local economic investment work?
by Lisa Buckner and Karen Escott - Welfare reform and recession: past labour market responses to job losses and the potential impact of Employment Support Allowance
by Paul Sissons - 'Insiderness', 'involvement' and emotions: impacts for methods, 'knowledge' and social research
by Rachael Dobson
‘Insiderness’, ‘involvement’ and emotions: impacts for methods, ‘knowledge’ and social research
Summary
This paper discusses ‘insider’ identity based on experiences as both social researcher and housing practitioner, drawing on Norbert Elias’s ‘involvement and detachment’ theory. Examples from doctoral research are used to illustrate where ‘involvement’ influenced social research processes.
‘Involvement’ was highlighted by reactions during research processes and this account describes transitions towards a more ‘detached’ perspective. This is not to discredit emotional reactions in research stages, or to suggest that we should seek to just manage those feelings. Instead, embracing and confronting reactions helped generate substantive findings and a ‘critical eye’ beneficial for developing more sophisticated explanatory insights. Understanding ‘involvement’ is an ongoing process that the researcher constantly refines and adapts through an experiential approach to social researching.
Those complex and challenging processes touch on important issues about what constitutes knowledge, what it means to ‘do’ social research and how it is possible to ‘be’ self critical.
