Martyn Hammersley (born 1949) is a British sociologist whose main publications cover social research methodology and philosophical issues in the social sciences. [1] [2]
Martyn Hammersley (born 1949) is a British sociologist whose main publications cover social research methodology and philosophical issues in the social sciences. [1] [2]
He studied sociology as an undergraduate at the London School of Economics (1967–70), and was subsequently a postgraduate student in the sociology department at the University of Manchester, obtaining an MPhil and PhD with a thesis reporting an ethnography of an inner-city secondary school. [3] At that time Manchester was a major centre for ethnomethodology, where it was in tension with symbolic interactionism and Marxism, and his work was influenced by all of these approaches. [4] [5]
After a research fellowship and temporary lectureship at Manchester, he obtained a permanent position at The Open University in 1975. He was recruited to work on E202Schooling and Society, a course that was subsequently embroiled in a public controversy about 'Marxist bias'. [6] He remained at the Open University until retirement in 2015, when he became Emeritus Professor of Education and Social Research. [7]
Hammersley's early research was in the sociology of education, with a particular focus on processes of classroom interaction in secondary schools. [8] He joined the Open University at a time when it was one of the leading centres for the 'new sociology of education', [9] and was involved in subsequent debates about the character and value of the various kinds of work coming under this heading. [10] [11]
Many of his publications have been concerned with methodological and philosophical issues arising in sociology, and across the social sciences generally. These issues have included: the nature and role of theory, the criteria by which qualitative research should be evaluated, and the issues of objectivity and value neutrality. [12] [13] He wrote a book on Herbert Blumer's methodological ideas, locating these in historical context. [14] He has written a number of articles on analytic induction (an approach developed by Florian Znaniecki), examining its history. In What's Wrong with Ethnography?, he advocates what he referred to as "subtle realism", [15] as opposed to various forms of relativism and scepticism. [16] [17] [18] [19] With Paul Atkinson, he wrote an introduction to ethnography, now in its fourth edition. [20]
He has also examined issues surrounding the qualitative-quantitative divide, and the nature of qualitative research. [21] [22] [23]
More recently he has co-authored a book on ethics and qualitative research. [24] He is a critic of ethical regulation, in other words of institutional review boards and research ethics committees, [25] and has sought to clarify the concept of academic freedom. [26] [27]
Hammersley has been involved in a series of controversies, for example over feminist methodology, [28] about racism and anti-racist research, [29] and concerning the character of qualitative research and the criteria of validity appropriate to it. [30] [31] He has also questioned the arguments of the evidence-based practice movement. [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] In The Limits of Social Science, he argued that social science is limited to the discovery of value-relevant explanations for social phenomena, a position that is at odds with the grandiose claims frequently made for its potential contribution to public policy making and to transformative political action. [37]
He has written about ethnomethodology, assessing its radical claims. [38] He has produced books about the concept of culture and about other key sociological concepts. [39] Most recently, he has written articles about the sociologist Karl Mannheim, [40] and a book on Methodological Concepts. [41]
Ethnography is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. Ethnography is also a type of social research that involves examining the behavior of the participants in a given social situation and understanding the group members' own interpretation of such behavior.
Medical anthropology studies "human health and disease, health care systems, and biocultural adaptation". It views humans from multidimensional and ecological perspectives. It is one of the most highly developed areas of anthropology and applied anthropology, and is a subfield of social and cultural anthropology that examines the ways in which culture and society are organized around or influenced by issues of health, health care and related issues.
Life history is an interviewing method used to record autobiographical history from an ordinary person's perspective, often gathered from traditionally marginalized groups. It was begun by anthropologists studying Native American groups around the 1900s, and was taken up by sociologists and other scholars, though its popularity has waxed and waned since. One of the major strengths of the life history method is that it provides a kind of voice from a social milieu that is often overlooked or indeed invisible in intellectual discourse.
Participant observation is one type of data collection method by practitioner-scholars typically used in qualitative research and ethnography. This type of methodology is employed in many disciplines, particularly anthropology, sociology, communication studies, human geography, and social psychology. Its aim is to gain a close and intimate familiarity with a given group of individuals and their practices through an intensive involvement with people in their cultural environment, usually over an extended period of time.
Qualitative research is a type of research that aims to gather and analyse non-numerical (descriptive) data in order to gain an understanding of individuals' social reality, including understanding their attitudes, beliefs, and motivation. This type of research typically involves in-depth interviews, focus groups, or observations in order to collect data that is rich in detail and context. Qualitative research is often used to explore complex phenomena or to gain insight into people's experiences and perspectives on a particular topic. It is particularly useful when researchers want to understand the meaning that people attach to their experiences or when they want to uncover the underlying reasons for people's behavior. Qualitative methods include ethnography, grounded theory, discourse analysis, and interpretative phenomenological analysis. Qualitative research methods have been used in sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, communication studies, social work, folklore, educational research, information science and software engineering research.
Ethnomethodology is the study of how social order is produced in and through processes of social interaction. It generally seeks to provide an alternative to mainstream sociological approaches. In its most radical form, it poses a challenge to the social sciences as a whole. Its early investigations led to the founding of conversation analysis, which has found its own place as an accepted discipline within the academy. According to Psathas, it is possible to distinguish five major approaches within the ethnomethodological family of disciplines.
Grounded theory is a systematic methodology that has been largely applied to qualitative research conducted by social scientists. The methodology involves the construction of hypotheses and theories through the collecting and analysis of data. Grounded theory involves the application of inductive reasoning. The methodology contrasts with the hypothetico-deductive model used in traditional scientific research.
Sociology as a scholarly discipline emerged, primarily out of Enlightenment thought, as a positivist science of society shortly after the French Revolution. Its genesis owed to various key movements in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of knowledge, arising in reaction to such issues as modernity, capitalism, urbanization, rationalization, secularization, colonization and imperialism.
Herbert George Blumer was an American sociologist whose main scholarly interests were symbolic interactionism and methods of social research. Believing that individuals create social reality through collective and individual action, he was an avid interpreter and proponent of George Herbert Mead's social psychology, which he labeled symbolic interactionism. Blumer elaborated and developed this line of thought in a series of articles, many of which were brought together in the book Symbolic Interactionism. An ongoing theme throughout his work, he argued that the creation of social reality is a continuous process. Blumer was also a vociferous critic of positivistic methodological ideas in sociology.
Humanistic sociology is a domain of sociology which originated mainly from the work of the University of Chicago Polish philosopher-turned-sociologist, Florian Znaniecki. It is a methodology which treats its objects of study and its students, that is, humans, as composites of values and systems of values. In certain contexts, the term is related to other sociological domains such as antipositivism. Humanistic sociology seeks to shed light on questions such as, "What is the relationship between a man of principle and a man of opportunism?"
Analytic induction is a research strategy in sociology aimed at systematically developing causal explanations for types of phenomena. It was first outlined by Florian Znaniecki in 1934. He contrasted it with the kind of enumerative induction characteristic of statistical analysis. Where the latter was satisfied with probabilistic correlations, Znaniecki insisted that science is concerned with discovering causal universals, and that in social science analytic induction is the means of discovering these.
The sociology of law, legal sociology, or law and society is often described as a sub-discipline of sociology or an interdisciplinary approach within legal studies. Some see sociology of law as belonging "necessarily" to the field of sociology, but others tend to consider it a field of research caught up between the disciplines of law and sociology. Still others regard it as neither a subdiscipline of sociology nor a branch of legal studies but as a field of research on its own right within the broader social science tradition. Accordingly, it may be described without reference to mainstream sociology as "the systematic, theoretically grounded, empirical study of law as a set of social practices or as an aspect or field of social experience". It has been seen as treating law and justice as fundamental institutions of the basic structure of society mediating "between political and economic interests, between culture and the normative order of society, establishing and maintaining interdependence, and constituting themselves as sources of consensus, coercion and social control".
Qualitative Research is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal covering qualitative research methods in the fields of sociology and other social sciences. It was established in 2001 and is published by SAGE Publications. The founding editors were Sara Delamont and P. Atkinson. The current editors-in-chief are Bella Dicks, Karen Henwood, and William Housley.
Critical ethnography applies a critical theory based approach to ethnography. It focuses on the implicit values expressed within ethnographic studies and, therefore, on the unacknowledged biases that may result from such implicit values. It has been called critical theory in practice. In the spirit of critical theory, this approach seeks to determine symbolic mechanisms, to extract ideology from action, and to understand the cognition and behaviour of research subjects within historical, cultural, and social frameworks.
Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. In simple words sociology is the scientific study of society. It uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order and social change. While some sociologists conduct research that may be applied directly to social policy and welfare, others focus primarily on refining the theoretical understanding of social processes and phenomenological method. Subject matter can range from micro-level analyses of society to macro-level analyses.
George Andrew Lundberg was an American sociologist.
Jason Hughes is a British professor of Sociology at University of Leicester, elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Science, appointed Member of the Academy of Europe, and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Previously, he worked as a Senior Lecturer at Brunel University in West London.
Susan "Sue" Speer C.Psychol, FHEA is a senior lecturer at the School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester.
Norman Kent Denzin was an American professor of sociology. He was an emeritus professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he was research professor of communications, College of Communications scholar, professor of sociology, professor of cinema studies, professor in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Denzin's academic interests included interpretive theory, performance studies, qualitative research methodology, and the study of media, culture and society.
Subtle realism is a philosophical position within social science that, along with other forms of realism, stands opposed to naïve realism and various kinds of relativism and scepticism. The term was coined by Martyn Hammersley. Its central issue is the relationship between the investigator and the phenomena being studied: are those phenomena and their characteristics independent of the process of inquiry, or is the character of what is investigated determined, structured, or shaped by the research? Subtle realism insists that phenomena are independent, but that knowledge of them is always constructed by the investigator—rather than, for example, being logically derived from sense impressions. It also asserts that social inquiry cannot reproduce phenomena, or capture their essence, but can only produce answers to particular questions about them.
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