In the twenty-first century, more than ever, everything and everybody seems to be on the move. Global flows of people, goods, food, money, information, services and media images are forming an intensely mobile background to everyday life. Social scientists, too, are on the move, seeking new analytical purchase on these important aspects of the social world by trying to move with, and to be moved by, the fleeting, distributed, multiple, non-causal, sensory, emotional and kinaesthetic. Mobile Methods addresses the challenges and opportunities of researching mobile phenomena. Drawing on extensive interdisciplinary discussion, the book brings together a collection of cutting-edge methodological innovations and original research reports to examine some important implications of the mobilities turn for the processes of ‘research’, and the realm of the empirical. Through analysis that addresses questions such as ‘how are social relationships and social institutions made in and through mobility?’, and ‘how do people experience mobility in twenty-first century world cities?', the authors mobilize sociological analysis, bringing new insights and opening up new opportunities for engagement with contemporary challenges. This book is a key text for undergraduate and postgraduate students of disciplines including Human Geography, Social Policy, Sociology and Research Methods.

Mobile media such as smartphones, apps, and social media are an integral part of everyday life, used by billions of people around the world. For students and researchers, mobile media also offer a treasure trove of new concepts, methods, and techniques to do research – representing a new phase in digital methods. Across disciplines, researchers rely upon mobile media for quantitative and qualitative projects, to gather data and document sound and images, engage with participants, and disseminate findings. This is the first textbook devoted to explaining these innovative and groundbreaking mobile media methods. Exploring the opportunities and limitations mobile media offer for methods, the book covers a range of topics from mobilities and placemaking to virtual reality and AI, as well as new kinds of mobility such as e-scooters and connected cars. Student-friendly features such as practical guidance on how to gather and analyse data alongside exercises are also included. Underscoring the book throughout is the definition of methods as not just a series of tools and techniques, but as an invitation to rethink how to conceptualize, practice, study and theorize the relationship between research, data and the field. Drawing from the best of mobile and digital communication research, Mobile Media Methods offers a clear, accessible, and practical guide to mobile media methods. It is essential reading and a useful resource for students and scholars of digital technology and research methods.

Over the past ten to fifteen years there has emerged an increasing concern with mobility in the social sciences and humanities. In Mobility, Space and Culture, Peter Merriman provides an important and timely contribution to the mobilities turn in the social sciences, encouraging academics to rethink the relationship between movement, embodied practices, space and place. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing upon theoretical and empirical work from across the social sciences and humanities to provide a critical evaluation of the relationship between 'mobility' and 'place'/'site', reformulating places as in process, open, and dynamic spatial formations. Merriman draws upon post-structuralist writings on space, practice and society to demonstrate how movement is not simply practised or experienced in relation to space and time, but gives rise to rhythms, forces, atmospheres, affects and materialities which are often more crucial to embodied apprehensions of events than sensibilities of spatiality and temporality. He draws upon detailed empirical research on experiences of, and social reactions to, driving in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain to trace how the motor-car became associated with sensations of movement-space and enmeshed with debates about embodiment, health, visuality, gender and politics. The book will be essential reading for undergraduates and postgraduates studying mobility in sociology, geography, cultural studies, politics, transport studies, and history.

The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Collection is a timely overview of the methodological developments available to social science researchers, covering key themes including: Concepts, Contexts, Basics Verbal Data Digital and Internet Data Triangulation and Mixed Methods Collecting Data in Specific Populations.

Thomas Ludwig reveals design characteristics when aiming at researching information infrastructures and their diverse information resources, types of users and systems as well as divergent practices. By conducting empirically-based design case studies in the domain of crisis management, the author uncovers methodological and design challenges in understanding new kinds of interconnected information infrastructures from a praxeological perspective. Based on implemented novel ICT tools, he derives design characteristics that focus on integrating objective and subjective queried insights into situated activities of people as well as emphasizing the subjective nature of information quality.

This book explores and celebrates imaginative and creative approaches to youth research, showcasing a wide range of innovative methods including music elicitation, mental mapping, blog analysis and mobile methods.

In contemporary Western societies, the visual domain has come to assume a hitherto unprecedented cultural centrality. Daily life is replete with a potentially endless stream of images and other visual messages: from the electronic and paper-based billboards of the street, to the TV and Internet feeds of the home. The visual has become imbued with a symbolic potency, a signifying power that seemingly eclipses that of all other sensory data. The central aim of this four-volume collection is to explore key approaches to visual research methods and to consider some of the core principles, issues, debates and controversies surrounding the use of visual techniques in relation to three key enterprises: 1) documentation and representation; 2) interpretation and classification and 3) elicitation and collaboration. Volume One: Principles, Issues, Debates and Controversies in Visual Research serves as a theoretical backdrop to the field as a whole. It introduces core epistemological, ethical and methodological debates that effectively cut across the four volume collection as a whole. Volume Two: Documentation and Representation illustrates approaches to visual documentation and representation, from classical documentaries to contemporary, state of the art modes of visual anthropology and ethnography. Volume Three: Interpretation and Classification examines core debates surrounding and approaches to visual analysis. Volume Four: Elicitation and Collaboration explores participative approaches to visual inquiry.

Volume 1: Theories, Methods and Ideas explores the mobility of ideas through time and space and how interdisciplinary theories and methodological approaches used in mobilities studies can be profitably utilised within the humanities and social sciences. Through a series of short chapters, mobility is employed as an elastic, inclusive and multifaceted concept across various disciplines to shed light on a geographically and chronologically broad range of issues and case studies. In doing so, the concept of mobility is positioned as a powerful catalyst for historical change and as a fruitful approach to research in the humanities and social sciences. Like its sister volume, this volume is edited and written by members of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility and the Humanities (MoHu) at the Department of Historical and Geographical Sciences and The Ancient World (DiSSGeA) of the University of Padua, Italy. The structure of the book mirrors the Theories and Methods, and Ideas thematic research clusters of the Centre. Afterwords from leading scholars from other institutions synthesise and reflect upon the findings of each section. This volume, together with Volume 2: Objects, People and Texts, makes a compelling case for the use of mobility studies as a research framework in the humanities and social sciences. As such, it will be of interest to students and researchers in various disciplines.

This forward-looking Research Handbook showcases cutting-edge research on the relationship between international migration and digital technology. It sheds new light on the interlinkages between digitalisation and migration patterns and processes globally, capturing the latest research technologies and data sources. Featuring international migration in all facets from the migration of tech sector specialists through to refugee displacement, leading contributors offer strategic insights into the future of migration and mobility.

Introducing a broad range of innovative and creative qualitative methods, this accessible book shows you how to use them in research project while providing straightforward advice on how to approach every step of the process; from planning and organisation to writing up and disseminating research. The authors provide a complete toolkit for conducting research in this field, while rendering the most novel and cutting-edge methods unintimidating to the reader.