Past Events
The below is just some of the events that have been run at Methods North West and our associated teams at our partner Universities.
You can find new events on our upcoming events page.
2021/22 – 2022/23
Click on the below events titles to be taken to the full event description:
- Multiple Imputation in practice
- The Power of Story-Telling: Tensions and Dilemmas
- Experience of Mixed Methods Approach to Criminological Research
- Development & application of a qualitative rapid analysis approach
- The Elephant in the dark: Power, habitus and decolonisation
- Large Language Models in Accounting & Finance, Introducing Fintext Project
- Building and Managing Digital Archives: theories, practices, and challenges
- The Change Laboratory: A Research Methodology for Engendering Change
- Dee-Constructing Human & Non-Human Relations: Acoustic Recording in the Dee
- Multispecies methods
- Researching the Life-Course Creatively
- Digital diaries as a decolnising method
- Using data analytics in equality, diversity & inclusion in higher education
- Activism as method
- Using Teams/Zoom Captions or Word Transcription
- The Body Is Electric: Using Bodily Responses to Explore Behavioural Sciences
- MethodsX Archival Stream Meeting: What is an archive?
- Unpacking market controversies using the Cartography of Controversies
- Using Instagram as a tool for social research
- Doing Interpretive Research
- What is Lived Experience? Towards a Biography of a Concept
- The power of the pen: Prisoners’ letters to explore extreme imprisonment
- Data-Powered Positive Deviance
- Using machine learning and natural language processing
- Decolonising Methods
- First Steps with Variational Bayes
- An introduction to Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis for social scientists
- Studying Violence: Concepts, Approaches and Challenges
- Post-structuralist approaches to critical discourse analysis
- Methods NorthWest Conference 2022
- Discovery-led approaches in the digital archive
- The use of civic hackathons as co-learning spaces for peer research
- Metaphors of menopause and how to analyse them
- Diverse economies: anticapitalocentric, hopeful reading for better worlds
- Hour ahead stock price forecasting: A comparative analysis of machine learning and deep learning models for high frequency financial time-series data
- Critically Considering Indigenizing initiatives in the curriculum in Canada
- Mixed Methods Approaches: Exploring the Impact of Work Placements
- A narrative orientated literature review
- Using Story Completion Narratives with Teachers | Speaker: Shirley Hewitt
- Digital fieldwork: Ethnography and exploration in digital spaces
- Data discovery for secondary analysis projects
- Conceptual analysis
- Stakeholder engagement in data science research
- Synthesizing qualitative research
- Researching recreational drug taking in the home
- Psychoanalysis as Methodology
- Using Agent-based Models to explore social phenomenon
- Metaphors of menopause and how to analyse them
- Diverse economies: anticapitalocentric, hopeful reading for better worlds
- An Introduction to Time Series Analysis and Forecasting
Multiple Imputation in practice
June 29 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Multiple Imputation in practice
Shunqi Zhang (University of Manchester)
Most longitudinal studies are plagued by missing data. Although missing data is often discussed in longitudinal studies, few researchers address it by multiple imputation. Implementing multiple imputation with statistical tools is technically easy. This talk aims to help the audience realise the potential applications in social science. The introduction includes a description of missing data mechanisms and multiple imputation, a rationale of the technique and a mini tutorial on the application of predictive mean matching (an approach of multiple imputation).
Register here
The Power of Story-Telling: Tensions and Dilemmas
June 22 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Claire Fitzpatrick (Lancaster University)
This talk reflects on recent research involving interviews with care-experienced girls and women, in prison and the community, and with the professionals who work with them. In particular, it examines some of the tensions and dilemmas associated with amplifying the voices of those rarely heard. Ethical issues linked to interviewing on sensitive topics and in locked institutions will be explored in the context of ongoing debates about the value of learning from those with ‘lived experience’. This talk will consider the power of story-telling, including thinking about how to maximise the impact of stories told as well as some of the unexpected effects. Despite the considerable challenges involved in research in this area, it is ultimately argued that such work can be vital in illuminating injustice and challenging stigma.
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Experience of Mixed Methods Approach to Criminological Research
June 15 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Learning from an Experience of Mixed Methods Approach to Criminological Research in the Global South
Mamun Usman (Lancaster University)
Mixed methods are important method of data generation for rigorously reliable outcomes in criminological research, offering opportunities to gain insights beyond designed limitations of quantitative research. However, it also constitutes ethical dilemmas and challenges for criminological researchers. For this reason, many researchers tend to rely more on secondary sources of data, and research relating to deprivation in criminological studies is not exceptional in this regard. This session discusses the importance of mixed method in exploring the relationship between deprivation and criminality, with a specific focus of experience from the global south, towards scrutinizing the criminological theories that are primarily developed and tested using data of the global north. The study was conducted in northern Nigeria, gathering data from Almajirai students of Tsangaya system of education. These are about 10 million children who are often perceived as criminals in their host communities, but there is little empirical research to substantiate this. The study brings to light of this community, and the global south experience in enriching the existing knowledge of the relationship between depth of deprivation and involvement in criminality, through in-depth interviews, one-to-one questionnaire interviews, and covert observations.
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Development & application of a qualitative rapid analysis approach
June 8 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Development and application of a qualitative rapid analysis approach in a hybrid trial within primary care
Amy Mathieson (University of Manchester)
Qualitative researchers are often faced with the challenge of conducting rigorous data collection, analysis, and dissemination of findings in short time frames, particularly within healthcare and implementation research. In the context of iterative feedback loops to support real-time policy decision making, and an emphasis on speeding up adoption of evidence-based interventions, qualitative health researchers will increasingly be expected to produce rapid results and products. Traditional qualitative methods have been adapted for this purpose. In this session, I will reflect upon our experience of developing and applying a rapid analysis approach, utilising a summary template, in a process evaluation for the VICTORION-Spirit study; a ground-breaking hybrid trial (NCT04807400), examining real world delivery of inclisiran – a cholesterol lowering treatment – in primary care. I will discuss the use of rapid analysis to understand the barriers and enablers to the delivery of inclisiran and to inform wider uptake. I will also reflect upon our experience of analysing and sharing findings in real-time, and discuss what this may mean for future qualitative health services research.
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The Elephant in the dark: Power, habitus and decolonisation
June 1 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Elham Amini (University of Liverpool)
This session explores issues concerning the sexuality of Iranian Muslim menopausal women, but focuses on how power was negotiated between me, as an interviewer, and the interviewees throughout the life history interviews I conducted with them. As an Iranian woman conducting interviews with Iranian Muslim menopausal women who practise the Shia Islam faith, I found, in addition to my biography and personal characteristics (such as gender, race, and sexual orientation), what Bourdieu calls the habitus (how I spoke, sat and what I wore) had a significant influence in how I negotiated my status with participants. Thus, I argue for the need to go beyond a focus on intersectional categories per se, and to look at the broader social landscape of power and its process. I do this by employing a Bourdieusian perspective, which considers the symbolic and cognitive elements by emphasising the social practice. I review my experience and the issue of positionality, to set the scene for the future prognosis of the online interviewing and the type of data it can generate by emphasising on its epistemological challenge. I consider this and related challenges for the existence and practice of qualitative interviews by emphasising on social inclusion approach in biographical research.
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Large Language Models in Accounting & Finance, Introducing Fintext Project
May 25 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Large Language Models in Accounting and Finance (LLM-A&F), Introducing Fintext Project
Eghbal Rahimikia (University of Manchester)
We start with FinText (https://fintext.ai/), a novel repository of financial word embeddings developed using the Dow Jones Newswires database. We show that incorporating these word embeddings in a machine learning model increases realised volatility forecasting performance. Next, we compare FinText performance against state-of-art NLP models like GPT-3 and GPT-J for return forecasting and trading. We demonstrate that publicly available FinText has reasonable forecasting power in contrast to pay-to-use industrial NLP models. Finally, we introduce our new project, ‘LLM-A&F’, and its potential applications for future research.
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Building and Managing Digital Archives: theories, practices, and challenges
May 18 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Allanah Tomkins & Rachel Bright (Keele University)
Building and Managing Digital Archives: theories, practices, and challenges. Rachel Bright and Alannah Tomkins will provide brief insights into their respective experiences of building digital archives for historical projects, using data that spans the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. They will focus on questions of intersectionality, the issues raised by data categorisation, and some of the resources available online. The subsequent discussion can explore the ways that students can take things further by developing, building, and using their own digital archives.
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The Change Laboratory: A Research Methodology for Engendering Change
May 11 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
The Change Laboratory: A Research Methodology for Engendering Change
Jane Nodder (Lancaster University)
Abstract Pending
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Dee-Constructing Human & Non-Human Relations: Acoustic Recording in the Dee
May 4 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Dee-Constructing Human and Non-Human Relations: Acoustic Recording in the Dee Estuary
Damian O’Doherty (University of Liverpool)
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Dee estuary on the border of Wales and England, this session reports on a phase of research that involved working with volunteer ‘citizen scientists’ enrolled by Cheshire Wildlife Trust and funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund to help promote improved environmental awareness and landscape care and custodial management. Volunteers were trained to use a variety of sound recording devices including a range of microphones, recorders (stereo and contact mics, hydrophones, etc.) and editing and post-production software. ‘Training’ workshops were designed to help cultivate attention and awareness to sound and otherwise hidden dimensions of experience that might help expand and extend members repertoire of engagement with landscape and environment. Developing methods familiar to scholars working in photo-elicitation methods our workshops devoted time to working on personal and collective ‘free association’ around recorded sounds. As the workshops progressed we discovered a series of personal limit-experiences amongst participants whose work with sound brought them to a series of ‘edges’ (spatial, temporal) that we began to understand as ‘portals to other-worlds’. During this process of discovery landscape disappears from its customary passive, environ-mental or objective status – subject to what Heidegger might call ‘the age of the world picture’ – and becomes vital and animate helping subjects recover highly personal memories and histories that inscribe landscape whilst opening up possible lines of re-creation and escape that offer new possibilities for landscape care and restoration.
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Events
Multispecies methods
April 20 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Multispecies methods
Catherine Oliver (Lancaster University)
Scholars in the social sciences are increasingly interested in ways to research (with) non-human beings and the more-than-human world. From fungi to whales, these novel methodological approaches are troubling and expanding what it means to do research, whilst simultaneously challenging notions of species – and the boundaries between them. Modes of immersion and openness to non-human others guide and ground these emergent forms of research, with scholars engaging creatively and speculatively to imagine new forms of ethnographic enquiry. In this class, we follow van Dooren et al’s (2016, Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness) call to ask “are all lively entities biological, or might a tornado, a stone, or a volcano be amenable to similar forms of immersion? What does it mean to live with others in entangled worlds of contingency and uncertainty? More fundamentally, how can we do the work of inhabiting and co-constituting worlds well?”. Across this masterclass, drawing on case studies from my research with chickens and birds, as well as other work in the multispecies social sciences, we will look at: (1) the emergence of multispecies methods, and what they contribute to methods across the social sciences; (2) how multispecies methods follow in the foots of feminist research to place emphasis on the political, on action, and on forms of activism focussed on specific issues; (3) care and the role of social researchers in living on and working with a damaged planet; and (4) how a multi-species and/or more-than-human sensibility might be embedded into social science research.
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Researching the Life-Course Creatively
March 30 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Researching the Life-Course Creatively
Sarah Marie Hall, Laura Fenton and Liz Ackerley (University of Manchester)
Abstract Pending
You will be sent the Zoom link and password after registration.
Register here
Digital diaries as a decolnising method
March 23 @ 2:30 pm – 3:00 pm
Digital diaries as a decolnising method
Aneta Hayes (Keele University)
In this seminar, Aneta Hayes (Keele University) will present and discuss Digital diaries as a decolnising method
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Using data analytics in equality, diversity & inclusion in higher education
March 16 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Using data analytics in equality, diversity and inclusion in higher education.
Sami Karamalla Gaiballa (University of Manchester)
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) is a key value of higher education institutions. The University of Manchester, like many other universities must take active steps to provide an inclusive environment for students, staff and visitors irrespective of their age, race, religion or belief (non-belief), sex and sexual orientation, disability and other characteristics. Data analysis plays a vital role in understanding existing patterns and making recommendations to improve EDI. In this talk, Sami Kramalla-Gaiballa will discuss his role as Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Data Analyst at the University of Manchester, and demonstrate how he uses data in his everyday role.
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Activism as method
March 9 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Jess Adams (Newcastle University)
What relationships do our research methods have to emancipatory or progressive political work? What sorts of benefits and repercussions are there for those who pursue these more engaged approaches to research? In this workshop, we’ll hear about how scholar activists (or militant researchers) use methods directly to benefit progressive political causes, and we’ll explore how these ideas relate to your own research. Attendees are invited to read and come ready to discuss this short reflection on scholar activism by Frances Fox Piven in advance: https://www.miguelangelmartinez.net/IMG/pdf/2010_Piven_Scholarship_Activism_Antipode.pdf
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Using Teams/Zoom Captions or Word Transcription
March 2 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Using Teams/Zoom Captions or Word Transcription: Three Approaches to Enhancement of Immersion, Focus or Scale of Qualitative Research
Dr. Steve Wright (Lancaster University)
This seminar will show you how to get, use, synchronise, correct and analyse accurate multi-lingual transcripts, using software available to PhD students for free. CONTEXT: The recent development and availability of accurate, automated text-to-speech recognition and creation of automated subtitles and transcripts has the potential to transform what can be achieved with qualitative analysis of spoken language. However, the adoption of automated transcription continues to be dogged by concerns about the potential loss of immersion. The focus of this seminar is the development of a teaching dataset to address these concerns by explaining and demonstrating how to harness these recent developments in software services through integration with Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS) packages such as NVivo and ATLAS.ti. METHODS APPORACHES: Three options for working with automatically created transcripts will be explored. The first enhances immersion through close listening and sequential correction of transcripts along with making reflective notes. Having immediate and ongoing access to synchronised audio creates the potential for a deeper level of analytic engagement drawing on the nuances available from the tone, tenor and tempo of speech and the meanings these carry. The second approach is selected focus based on listening to audio while reading the transcript and marking analytically interesting segments for closer attention and detailed transcription (up to Jeffersonian levels of detail). The third approach is to substantially expand the scale of research. Depth of engagement is intentionally traded for a substantial increase in the breadth and scope of working with larger corpora of automated transcripts enabling text mining, with synchronised audio providing added detail and checks for accuracy. The dataset and approaches will be demonstrated in a practically focussed session.
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The Body Is Electric: Using Bodily Responses to Explore Behavioural Sciences
February 9 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
The Body Is Electric: Using Bodily Responses to Explore Behavioural Sciences
Siobhan Caughey (University of Manchester)
Physiological measurements allow for precise information about an individual’s bodily functions, thereby allowing researchers to study the relationship between processes and behaviour. While EEGs (electroencephalograms) are often used within research to record brain activity, other physiological measurements are often overlooked. Heart rate (ECG, electrocardiogram), skin conductance (EDA, electrodermal activity), and eye tracking all have a place within research and can be used to explore bodily responses. Alone, each of the measurements can indicate arousal and changes within the body. Together, different physiological responses can be used to gain a clearer understanding of how the body is reacting in the process under investigation. With examples from psychology, criminology, and business, this talk introduces the use of more advance methodologies within behavioural research.
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MethodsX Archival Stream Meeting: What is an archive?
February 8 @ 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm
8th February: What is an archive?
2nd Wednesday of the month, 2-4pm
Meeting link here.
In the first formal meeting of the archival stream, we will be discussing one of the most important – and difficult – aspects of archival research: what is an archive? The archive can take a myriad of forms – institutional, activist, paper, digital, creative, informal – but across these forms, there must be shared characteristics and constructions. Amongst the members of this stream, the archives we work with are varied and, on the face of it, might share little in common. But the archive is an important space and serves a vital function in memory and documentation, albeit imbued with different power dynamics and intentions.
To inspire the discussion, we will be reading the following text(s):
Key Reading: Stuart Hall, Constituting an Archive, Third Text, 15:54, 89-92, https://doi.org/10.1080/09528820108576903
Further Reading: Thomas Osborne, The Ordinariness of the Archive, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/09526959922120243
Unpacking market controversies using the Cartography of Controversies
February 2 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Unpacking market controversies using the Cartography of Controversies
Olfa Mejri (Lancaster University)
Organizational researchers are increasingly interested in studying social networks and their outcomes on how organizations (and the social) are shaped. However, traditional social network research approaches still appear quite limited in their ability to capture the dynamic processes of the studied networks, and are also predominately focused on quantitative data (Williams and Shepherd, 2017). Besides, social researchers are less equipped to study and describe social networks in contentious settings that present intricate and multiple debated realities (Venturini, 2010). This presentation aims at discussing the relevance of a promising practical toolbox inspired from the Actor Network Theory, the Cartography of Controversies (CC), for the analysis of market and social networks in controversial settings, using exclusively documentary data. This pragmatic method provides researchers with numerous conceptual and methodological advantages. It offers a set of progressive lenses guiding the course of data collection and data analysis, capturing the formation and evolution of competing networks. Beyond mapping networks’ structure, the CC is a tool for mapping webs of relations and meaning, highlighting agencies involved in tying/untying and mutually transforming the observed networks. The CC also deals with some of the most common challenges associated with the use of qualitative documentary data, namely the question of ‘unit of analysis’, ‘theoretical/data saturation’ and effectively organising and exploiting overwhelming amounts of data, enhancing the ‘objectivity’ and validity of qualitative research outcomes.
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Using Instagram as a tool for social research
Using Instagram as a tool for social research
Adele Moore (University of Liverpool)
Evolving vastly from a simple photo sharing app launched in 2010, Instagram is the 4th most popular social media platform, with 1.21 billion users worldwide, facilitating interaction between users today via the sharing of photos, reels, IG TV and stories. This session will describe how I used Meta’s Instagram to explore the ways in which contraceptive knowledge is developed and shared on social media. Drawing on my own data collection methods, I will outline the various ethical and methodological considerations which can emerge when utilising Instagram as a method of social research.
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Doing Interpretive Research
Doing Interpretive Research: Learning to Relate to the World Abductively
Koen Bartels (University of Birmingham)
To many social scientists, interpretivism has an intuitive appeal but at the same time it seems intimidating. They often do not know how to find their way in the, sometimes bewildering, interpretivist landscape or they lack the right training and guidance for developing the requisite knowledge, experience and confidence for learning how to actually do it. This interactive session offers an experiential learning approach to doing interpretive research. It focuses in particular on how we can learn to relate to the world abductively. We observe that many (aspiring) interpretive researchers tend to develop abstract research topics and questions that offer a shaky foundation for their project. Interpretive research advocates an abductive logic, which remains elusive and challenging. We explain abduction as a process of working through emotions to create new ways of relating to the world. We offer a range of heuristics for anchoring the research that strengthens the way interpretive researchers conduct their research and position themselves in the field.
What is Lived Experience? Towards a Biography of a Concept
Paul Jones (University of Liverpool)
Lived experience has got a central place in social science, but at the same time is a somewhat fuzzy concept. On the one hand, social research inextricably deals with the experiences and perspectives of others; on the other, academic analysis usually – arguably even should – means more than giving voice to participants’ perceptions. Reporting on some early-stage theoretical study of these tensions, this session offers some lines of inquiry with respect to the status of lived experience in academic study.
The power of the pen: Prisoners’ letters to explore extreme imprisonment
The power of the pen: Prisoners’ letters to explore extreme imprisonment
Data-Powered Positive Deviance
In this sessison, Basma Albanna (University of Manchester) will give a talk and demonstrate the use of Data-Powered Positive Deviance
In any community, there are those who achieve significantly better outcomes than their peers. Despite having the same resources and limitations, they find more effective solutions to complex challenges. The positive deviance approach seeks to identify these outperformers and understand the strategies behind their success so they can be replicated. Data powered positive deviance (DPPD) builds on this approach, giving practitioners a method to use digital datasets, such as earth observation and mobility data, to identify positive deviants. Their local solutions can then be uncovered and used to inform community and policy interventions.
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Using machine learning and natural language processing
Using machine learning and natural language processing to enable text analysis at scale for better understanding harm to children who go missing in England.
Nicola Fox (University of Manchester)
Analysing text data for quantitative analysis, such as content analysis, or qualitative analysis, such as thematic analysis, can be time-consuming, resulting in small and unrepresentative samples, which makes it harder for the research community to reach generalisable conclusions. Computational techniques such as natural language processing (NLP) combined with machine learning (ML) could enable the automation of this analysis so that it can be done at scale. This talk with provide a beginners-level overview of NLP with ML and illustrate the potential application of these techniques in the analysis of a large volume of documents to better understand the extent to which published cases of serious harm to children involve missing person incidents.
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Decolonising Methods
What does the decolonial learning discourse mean for social science research methods? As part of our celebrations of Black History Month, Methods NorthWest will host a panel discussion on Decolonising Methods featuring Dr Leon Moosavi (Liverpool University and Dr Njabulo Chipangura (The University of Manchester). The panel to be chaired by Methods Northwest Director, Dr Admos Chimhowu will explore ongoing scholarly conversations about decolonial knowledge generation and learning and its implications for social sciences research methods.
First Steps with Variational Bayes
Variational Bayes is a tool used to allow scalable Bayesian inference, and is applicable in a huge variety of applications. This course will give an introduction to Variational Bayes and describe its use in some simple settings. The course will consist of a lecture introducing the basic concepts of variational Bayes, and a practical session in R, where participants will be able to learn how to fit variational Bayes models in simple settings using both bespoke codes and some common R packages.
Format:
This short course will comprise an hour long introduction to variational Bayes and a 75 minute practical using R with a short break in between for Q&As and space for discussion at the end.
Pre-requisites:
This course will assume that participants will have some prior familiarity with Bayesian analysis. This need not be expert, but should be some experience of regression models. Some experience of using R would be beneficial. Typical candidates would have a first or second degree in one of Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, or in a quantitative Social Sciences or Arts and Humanities field, such as Social Statistics or Digital Humanities). A short list of packages to install in R before the event will be circulated to participants.
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An introduction to Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis for social scientists
Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis is a method of researching large collections of text data, such as media re-ports, political speeches and interview data. Originally used in linguistic research, this method is becoming more popular in the wider social sciences and, thanks to advances in computer software, is increasingly becoming an accessible method of research for those without a background in linguistics.
This session will provide an introduction to corpus-assisted discourse analysis for PhD students, postgraduate researchers (PGRs) and early-career researchers (ECRs) researching in the social sciences. The session will be led by Dr Luke Collins from the Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) centre at Lancaster University, with contributions from Dr Kathryn Spicksley, who used corpus-assisted discourse analysis during her PhD study in education.
Following the session there will be the opportunity to apply for a mentoring scheme, with the aim of developing knowledge and confidence in using these exciting and innovative research methods within a community of new researchers who share an interest in discourse, identity and culture.
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Studying Violence: Concepts, Approaches and Challenges
Studying Violence: Concepts, Approaches and Challenges
Deana Heath (University of Liverpool)
What do we mean by the term ‘violence’ – does it include, for example, famine, social suffering, or the intergenerational effects of postcolonial trauma – and how do we theorise it? What are some of the ways, moreover, that we can go about studying it, and what sorts of challenges might we encounter when we do? This workshop will focus on some of the challenges of carrying out research on violence and suggest some potential ways to address these.
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Post-structuralist approaches to critical discourse analysis
In this talk, Camila Montiel McCann (University of Liverpool) will present on post-structuralist approaches to critical discourse analysis
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Methods NorthWest Conference 2022
We are delighted to announce the Methods North West Annual Conference hosted by the
University of Manchester on 10th June 2022. The conference brings together PhDs, early
career researchers, and established academics and practitioners to discuss emerging trends
and innovations in research methods.
Theme: Inequalities in research and methods
As the world emerges from the Covid 19 Pandemic, one issue of relevance to recovery
is inequality. Inequality is both a topic of research, and something which affects research
methods and methodologies themselves. The Methods North West Conference 2022 invites
participants to submit conference papers to be presented in talks of up to 20 minutes that
engage broadly with the theme of inequalities and research methods.
Please submit Abstracts (no longer than 250 words) by 18/05/2022 using this form here
Submission deadline: 18th May 2022
Conference Date: 10th June 2022
Discovery-led approaches in the digital archive
Roslyn Irving (University of Liverpool)
Archives are filled with voices of the past, waiting to be uncovered, and a discovery-based approach offers the flexibility to engage with these texts and allow them to take the lead. During my master’s research, I visited special collections. I could physically touch the materials and turn delicate pages. In essence, materials from the early twentieth-century were tangible to me. My PhD research, which began in the midst of the pandemic, has been a very different experience. As physical archives became inaccessible, the digital archive became my doorway into the eighteenth-century. This session addresses the complexities of undertaking archival research and what I have learned using digitised texts. It will also consider how to filter and select sources and find resonances between historical documents and literature.
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The use of civic hackathons as co-learning spaces for peer research
This online seminar explores the use of civic hackathon events as co-learning spaces to support peer research projects. It builds on work we are currently doing in our role as Learning Partner for the Youth Endowment Fund’s Peer Action Collective. In this project we used a hackathon to co-produce the first prototype framework for a developmental learning inquiry, collaborating with young potential peer researchers to ensure this was set up to learn about what was most important to them. Session 1 will be run as a live mini-hackathon lasting 90 mins. In this space we will set a challenge: to co-create a prototype framework for understanding peer research. Participants will be asked to reflect on the spaces where they work, their experiences of and hopes for peer research and the themes which link their ideas to those of others in the session. We will close by voting for reviewing and prioritising themes to include in our shared prototype framework.
This will be followed by a 30 minute break.
Session 2 will start with a fuller story about how we have used the Hackathon approach in the project, the limitations and what was enabled. This will be followed by a session in which we will work with those who attend to reflect on their own experience and to discuss together possible ways in which the approach can be modified and applied in other research contexts. This will last 60 minutes.
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Metaphors of menopause and how to analyse them
Pernille Bogø-Jørgensen (Lancaster University)
Metaphor is a slippery linguistic phenomenon and much discussion has gone into developing rules for how to identify it. A current practice is the well-tested Metaphor Identification Procedure, MIP, (Pragglejaz, 2007) and its further development MIPVU (Steen et al, 2010), which is replicable across several languages (see Nacey et al. 2019). Replicability comes at the cost of restrictiveness as does any procedure that seeks to make qualitative data countable. However, in my research it functions as a starting point for a discussion about what metaphor is. This talk will address how I have applied MIP to my data as well as made it complement the metaphor scenarios theory proposed by Musolff (2006). Metaphor scenarios are ‘mini-narratives’ that set out possibilities, expectations and evaluations for actors and their actions. In my data, this relates to menopause as it is construed in Danish and US American medical websites and women’s magazines. My aim is to contribute to a broader discussion about triangulation of methods to analyse metaphor in natural language.
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Diverse economies: anticapitalocentric, hopeful reading for better worlds
Pete North (University of Liverpool)
This seminar will examine methods for uncovering and developing better worlds, and thinking about more hopeful ontologies as developed by scholars associated with the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham. How can we uncover and develop better stories, visions practices about how we and others can live well in the Anthropocene, What methods are used by diverse economies scholars to build better worlds?
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Hour ahead stock price forecasting: A comparative analysis of machine learning and deep learning models for high frequency financial time-series data
Robina Iqbal (Keele University)
Tabular neural networks handle categorical and continuous columns differently as compared to other algorithms such as Random Forest. This study set out to investigate the efficacy of Tabular Learner (TL) and evaluated their performance with LSTM, GRU and Random Forest models in making one hour ahead prediction of stock prices. fastsai’s TL was used for training while a strategic validation approach for time-series analysis was implemented.
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Critically Considering Indigenizing initiatives in the curriculum in Canada
Speakers: Jillian Seniuk Cicek, Alan Steele, Afua Adobea Mante, Pam Wolf, Mary Robinson
Abstract
The presenters have been participating in research to determine, and critically consider, the work being done in the place now called Canada, to make space for Indigenous Peoples and their ways of being, knowing, doing and relating in the curriculum, motivated by the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action (2015). The presenters engaged in Participatory Action Research (PAR) to dialogue with higher education tutors in accredited engineering programs across the country. They then used Gaudry and Lorenz’s (2018) spectrum of Indigenization to evaluate these self-reported contributions from 25 programs and four organizations. This presentation will take participants on a circular journey through our methodological processes. We will begin with land acknowledgements, as an explicit recognition of the traditional lands belonging to Indigenous peoples, the treaties that govern Canada, and “our presence on the land as visitors and as a part of colonial history” (Indigenous Advisory Committee, Engineers Canada 2021). We will position ourselves in this space, acknowledging our own histories. We will provide definitions to help navigate the space, and give our research context by providing a brief history and present socio-political landscape. We will frame the research with Etuaptmumk, “Two-Eyed Seeing”, and describe our methodological approaches, ending with researcher reflections. We will leave time for discussion and questions. We offer ourselves as colleagues who appreciate the opportunity to present our work in your community and look forward to the dialogues that ensue.
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Mixed Methods Approaches: Exploring the Impact of Work Placements
Kerry Traynor, Kate Evans, Chris Barlow, Amy Gerrard (University of Liverpool)
The positive impacts of work placements on academic achievement and graduate outcomes are well documented across a range of disciplines, but less is known about who gains access to placements and the extent to which benefits are realised across different student groups. This talk will set out a mixed methods framework for exploring placement access and experiences amongst students from a diverse range of backgrounds using surveys, interviews and institutional datasets, highlighting ethical considerations and some of the practical challenges arising through fieldwork.
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A narrative orientated literature review
In this event, Sihui Wang (Keele University) will present on: An integrative approach – A narrative orientated literature review, incorporating systematic practices
The literature review is an ongoing and messy task throughout the PhD journey. Have you ever been concerned about missing some important literature? Have you ever felt lost in the overwhelming volume of literature? Or have you ever wondered where you should start from and how to organise your literature review? Based on the presenter’s own PhD experience and exploration of methodological literature, this talk introduces an integrative approach to conduct a narrative-orientated literature review, while incorporating systematic practices.
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Using Story Completion Narratives with Teachers | Speaker: Shirley Hewitt
This seminar will consider the use of narratives in gaining understanding of refugee policy and links to inclusion policy from the viewpoints of five teachers. As well as being part of a wider analysis of policy agendas, an additional aim is to produce a narrative collection which can be used to support future dialogue or CPD opportunities in school. The methodology is an amalgamation of narrative types and requires participants to jointly create and agree a story with the researcher. Photographs and stem sentences are used as stimuli to create a story, based on real or hypothetical events (Reismann, 1993; Georgakopoulo, 2013). This allows participants to express their beliefs and values (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000) with plausible deniability (Clarke and Braun, 2013; Clarke et al, 2019). The narrative structure uses a standard narrative arc with an ending which can be positive, negative or ambiguous. The participants are then asked to justify their decisions and consider any potential opportunities for challenge within the narrative (Atkinson and Delamont, 2006; Norton and Early, 2011). It is held within a specific time frame and is open to interpretation both at the point of creation and in future analysis (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000; Atkinson and Delamont, 2006; Downey et al, 2014). Each narrative has a temporal existence and is encompassed within postmodernist epistemology.
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Digital fieldwork: Ethnography and exploration in digital spaces
In this seminar, Carwyn Moris (University of Manchester) will work on the use of ethnographic approaches and fieldwork in digital spaces.
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Data discovery for secondary analysis projects
Data discovery for secondary analysis projects – finding and accessing data from the UK Data Service and beyond
In this talk, Alle Bloom (UK Data Service) will present work from the UK Data Service
Data discovery is an important part of any secondary analysis project, and knowing where and how to find and access data is a key skill for any researcher. This interactive workshop will introduce data discovery as a key step in the research process, outline how to find and access data from the UK Data Service and beyond (including international archives) and allow participants to practice some data discovery of their own.
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Conceptual analysis
Sorin Baiasu (Keele University)
Most research would involve the use of words and a written piece. Some of the words we use in our research are more important than others, for instance, they are central for the topic or occur more often in our written work. It becomes particularly important for a successful research, therefore, that these terms be defined sufficiently precisely, in order to avoid confusions, ambiguities and vagueness. This session explains these pitfalls and presents conceptual analysis as a method which helps us address them.
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Stakeholder engagement in data science research
This talk will be delivered by Ellen Schwaller & James Watson (University of Liverpool)
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Synthesizing qualitative research
Synthesizing qualitative research
Julius Sim (School of Medicine, Keele University)
Different approaches to the synthesis of qualitative research will be explored, examining some of the methodological challenges involved
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Researching recreational drug taking in the home
Lisa Williams (University of Manchester)
The practice of recreational drug taking in private spaces is a relatively hidden activity. Moreover, no social science research has collected visual data in recreational drug takers homes. The present study aims to explore, using photography and object interview methods, the strategies drug takers use when storing drugs in the home to avoid detection from authorities and other people, and the nature and purpose of recreational drug taking in the home. The presentation will outline the research design, associated ethical dilemmas and practical issues encountered in the field.
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Psychoanalysis as Methodology
In this session, Moran Mandelbaum (Keele University) will talk about Psychoanalysis as Methodology
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Using Agent-based Models to explore social phenomenon
In this session, J. Kasmire (University of Manchester) will talk about using Agent-based Models to explore social phenomenon.
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Metaphors of menopause and how to analyse them
Pernille Bogø-Jørgensen (Lancaster University)
Metaphor is a slippery linguistic phenomenon and much discussion has gone into developing rules for how to identify it. A current practice is the well-tested procedure MIPVU (Steen et al, 2010), which is replicable across several languages (see Nacey et al. 2019). This replicability comes at the cost of restrictiveness as does any procedure that seeks to make qualitative data countable. However, in my research it functions as a starting point for a discussion about what metaphor is.
This talk will address how I have adapted MIPVU to my data as well as made it complement the metaphor scenarios theory proposed by Musolff (2006). Metaphor scenarios are ‘mini-narratives’ that set out possibilities, expectations and evaluations for actors and their actions. In my data, this relates to menopause as it is construed in Danish and US American medical websites and women’s magazines. My aim is to contribute to a broader discussion about triangulation of methods to analyse metaphor in natural language.
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Diverse economies: anticapitalocentric, hopeful reading for better worlds
Pete North (University of Liverpool)
This seminar will examine methods for uncovering and developing better worlds, and thinking about more hopeful ontologies as developed by scholars associated with the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham. How can we uncover and develop better stories, visions practices about how we and others can live well in the Anthropocene, What methods are used by diverse economies scholars to build better worlds?
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An Introduction to Time Series Analysis and Forecasting
Nadia Kennar (University of Manchester)
Time series analysis accounts for the fact that data points taken over time may have an internal structure (such as noise, trend, seasonal variation and noise) that should be accounted for. This talk will cover a brief introduction to time series analysis and time series forecasting using open-sourced crime data to address these internal structures.
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