Case Study and Presentation: The learner will depict the Case Study and provide a written APA formatted paper providing the following: Identifying at least 3 Issues/Problems
Analysis and Evaluation of the identified Issues/Problems
Recommendations to resolve the Issues/Problems
A 10-12 minutes Presentation depicting your Case Study; In order to present, you must submit a
PPTX, an Outline, Prezi, Video, or some other form of media. The media and your paper are two separate things.
International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 2018
VOL. 21, NO. 4, 425–438
https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2018.1431192
Friendships with benefits? Examining the role of friendship in
semi-structured interviews within music research
Raphaël Nowak
and Jo Haynes§
Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University, Nathan, Australia
ABSTRACT
This article explores the ‘methodology of friendship’ and its wider potential
within music research. Drawing on two research examples that made use of
‘friendship’ in distinct fashions – one that explores music listening practices
in everyday life and the other, music as a site for racialisation – the article
discusses how friendship can be incorporated within semi-structured
interviews. The case studies act as examples of how to negotiate alterity in
music research and how friendship represents a potential for gathering more
detailed data. The notion of ‘alterity’, at the core of research relationships is
critical to shift the conversation to an informal tone and improve the depth
of the discourses gathered from informants. Consequently, this article
addresses debates within qualitative (music) sociology by reconsidering
friendship as an axis of power and examines the nature of the data gathered
in semi-structured interviews through the methodology of friendship.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 2 September 2017
Accepted 17 January 2018
KEYWORDS
Alterity; insider knowledge;
listening practices;
methodology of friendship;
sociology of music
1. Introduction
This article explores different uses and manifestations of the methodology of friendship in qualitative empirical research in music sociology. Music is a very peculiar cultural object, notably due to its
‘ubiquity’ (see Kassabian, 2013) and its association with various aspects of everyday life (see DeNora,
2000). Empirical research about the ways in which music is present within everyday life and how it
mediates social relationships tends to include various types of participants, including ‘normal individuals’ (DeNora, 2000; Lilliestam, 2013; Martin, 2006), in an age when all individuals are supposedly
music ‘amateurs’ (Hennion, Maisonneuve, & Gomart, 2000). Music also has the potential to connect
people (DeNora, 2000; Hesmondhalgh, 2013). In this regard, the relationship between the researcher
and their participants may vary, from the very beginning of empirical research, or within the unfolding
context of empirical research.
Social researchers constantly seek to develop new empirical tools that will better their ‘sociological
imagination’ (Wright-Mills, 1962). In contemporary societies that are said to have become increasingly
complex (see Urry, 2006), some authors point to the ‘coming crisis’ of empirical sociology (see Beer,
2009; Savage & Burrows, 2007), while others remain sceptical of methodological innovations (see
Travers, 2009; Wiles, Crow, & Pain, 2011). The entanglement of globalised, technological and societal
processes brings sociologists to interrogate what the adequate empirical tools are to grasp complex
CONTACT Raphaël Nowak
r.nowak@griffith.edu.au
§
School of Sociology, Politics, and International Studies, University of Bristol, United Kingdom.
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
426
R. NOWAK AND J. HAYNES
issues. Specifically, this article responds to a long-lasting need to explore new empirical means to
capture the ways in which music mediates everyday life and social relationships (see discussions by
Beer, 2009; Cohen, 1993; Grazian, 2004 among others). Because music is a ubiquitous and yet elusive
cultural object, practices of music consumption and its mediation of social relationships requires a
nuanced empirical approach.
This article revisits friendship as the basis of a methodology that can be refined and applied within
the context of semi-structured interviews in music research. Rather than viewing friendship as a
methodological complication that is ideally distinct from the context of research, we first argue that
its variety of modes, purposes and visibilities in people’s lives today, suggests that its incorporation or
development within cultural research offers theoretical and methodological opportunities. Friendship
not only enables access to diverse cultural practices that individuals are embedded within, it also disrupts a priori relationships often assumed between ‘classic’ social variables and forms of distinction
thereby enabling a deeper excavation of the mechanisms through which music operates.
In line with the precepts of the cultural turn in sociology, we also argue in this article that the
‘methodology of friendship’ (see for example Owton & Allen-Collinson, 2014; Taylor, 2011; TillmannHealy, 2003) is a tool that sheds light upon the intricate ways in which individuals experience their
everyday lives and thus, upon how ‘everyday life’ is a site of contestation and struggle (see Bennett,
2005). Recently adapted from anthropological research,1 this method is primarily used in participant
observations where researchers have the possibility to prolong the time spent with their informants. In
these conditions, researchers benefit from a favourable terrain to develop friendship and negotiate the
variable of alterity with their informants, which is the primary tenet to become an insider researcher.
However, the methodology of friendship also incorporates intimacies derived from friend-informants,
whereby the researcher’s existing friendships may be embedded within or overlap with the research
space. Where research focuses on cultural contexts that researchers are already embedded within such
as music subcultures and scenes and/or where participants are difficult to access, existing networks of
friends are often essential to the research as informants. Furthermore, carrying out semi-structured
interviews in music research with friend-informants can facilitate the potential for deeper analysis by
enhancing the interpretative practice through shared knowledge.
This article explores the potential of both modes of friendship in semi-structured interviews –
informant-friends and friend-informants. It is organised into seven sections. Following this introduction, the second section briefly defines the scope and meaning of friendship emphasising variability
and levels of visibility and meaning. The third section then looks at the methodology of friendship
and its application in recent research including studies of music scenes, in order to discuss how this
empirical tool represents a relevant step forward in qualitative sociological research. We then proceed
in the fourth section to deconstruct the configuration of semi-structured interviews in order to identify
how principles of the methodology of friendship can be implemented within the encounters between
the researcher and their informants. The fifth section discusses research on music listening practices
in everyday life, before moving on to scrutinise the application of the methodology of friendship
to Nowak’s research example. The sixth section examines Haynes’ research example focused on music
and race and offers critical reflections of the changing knowledge relations derived from friend-informants. The seventh section concludes by evaluating the outcomes of the use of this method on
research on music and listening practices in everyday life.
2. The space of/for friendship in qualitative sociological research
The role and status of friendship in qualitative research is subject to critical consideration within
methodological debates about ‘insiderism’ or ‘insider knowledge’ (Browne, 2003), ‘insider research’
(Hodkinson, 2005) or ‘insiders and outsiders’ (Merton, 1972).2 Such debates question the differential
impact that the degree of social or cultural proximity between researcher and informants or researcher
and field of enquiry has on knowledge production. Friendship, along with shared social status derived
from belonging to the same social category (e.g. gender, class, ethnicity or sexuality), constitute the two
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
427
‘axes of power’ that grant insider status within research (Browne, 2003).3 While there is acknowledgement that the insider/outsider dichotomy should be thought of more as a ‘continuum’ and ‘contextual’
(see Nowicka & Ryan, 2015), this is typically based on emphasising how knowledge is produced by
social actors that have multi-sited positionality constituted by a variety of combinations of shared or
different social characteristics. There is however less consideration of the ways in which friendship
itself is defined and experienced over time and precisely how the varying quality, intensity and characteristics of each friendship shapes knowledge production and how in turn this knowledge may have
a reciprocal impact on existing friendships themselves. Thus, the implementation of friendship within
qualitative research is often akin to a ‘black box’, where although its impact and effect is considered
in relation to critical distance, analytical rigour, bias and ethical considerations, its internal dynamics
and implementation are opaque.
Pahl and Spencer (2010) explore the salience of contemporary friendship and suggest that there
is no consensus on what a friend is, or should be. Moreover, as Rawlins argues, ‘[s]tatic definitions of
friendship fail to capture the lived actualities of friendships – their finitude, flexibility, and fragility’
(2008, p. 13). Indeed, Rawlins sees friendship as manifesting itself in a myriad of ‘varieties, tensions
and functions’ (2008, p. 2). Similarly, Pahl and Spencer argue that actual friendship incorporates a
range of modes, meanings and visibilities such that individuals tend to have a coterie of intimate and
non-intimate friends ranging from:
simple relationships based on shared activities, fun or favours, to more complex and intimate ties involving
emotional support and trust – from associates and what some referred to as ‘champagne friends’, to confidants
and ‘soul-mates’. (2010, p. 4)
Friendship therefore, as Rawlins suggests, ‘exist on a panoramic continuum of everyday contingencies’
(2008, p. 13). In addition, the meaningfulness of the distinction between friendships and relationships
with family members is becoming blurred given that, ‘some friends may play family-like roles and
some family members play friend-like roles’ (Pahl & Spencer, 2010, p. 10). Thus, family relationships
are potentially qualitatively similar to our relationships to friends and can similarly be experienced
through differing levels of companionship, intimacy and support.
In light of the variation in friendship and family experiences and ties, people are therefore better
understood as being embedded in what Pahl and Spencer (2010, p. 14) describe as a ‘personal community’, which refers to an individual’s collection of important personal relationships at a particular time
that can be derived from and situated within and across work, leisure, family, cultural and political
pursuits. Rawlins (2008) invites us to think about how friendship unfolds ‘across the life course’. Indeed,
friendship must not be thought of as a monolithic category, but rather as configured in context by
interpersonal relationships. Moreover, we would add that as social media has facilitated friendships and
relationships that transcend vast geographical boundaries, the assemblage of personal ties an individual has can also incorporate some that never have any corresponding offline, face-to-face experience.
The issues and topics that researchers develop interest in are often derived from their lived experiences and/or are features of the social and cultural milieus they are embedded within. In this sense,
given the relative proximity and/or overlap between researchers and their lived experiences, including
their assemblage of personal ties and the sites of sociological interest, the research space does not have
to be conceived as elsewhere or somewhere separate – an objectified social space that researchers enter
temporarily. Instead, as Browne suggests, they are better conceptualised as spaces where …
researchers and participants come into being through what we do and the dynamics between researchers and
participants, there are no pre-existing scripts, actors or spaces that are simply observed. Rather, through research
performances and relations we (re)create research accounts, spaces, researchers and participants. (2003, p. 134)
Our personal ties in which we are embedded – with both friends and family – are already and inadvertently subject to our sociological gaze. Instead of attempting to methodologically excise research/
researchers from their everyday experiences and embeddedness within social and cultural milieu as
an attempt to seek social and critical distance, closer examination of our embeddedness within the
428
R. NOWAK AND J. HAYNES
research space and how sameness/difference and degrees of intimacy are negotiated is likely to enable
the production of more authentic and nuanced knowledge.
Some of the earlier writing on friendship as method, acknowledges these negotiations. For instance,
Tillman-Healy suggests that,
[f]riendship and fieldwork are similar endeavours. Both involve being in the world with others. To friendship
and fieldwork communities, we must gain entrée. We negotiate roles (e.g. student, confidant, and advocate),
shifting from one to another as the relational context warrants. (2003, p. 732)
Thus, an important principle of a methodology of friendship is that the research space can be framed
as incorporating friendship–informant relations as an inevitable condition of knowledge production
and as a potential site for developing informant-friendships, but nevertheless friendship is a condition
that is both subject to sustained analysis and susceptible to change because of the dynamics of research
and the shifting nature of insider–outsider relations themselves.
3. Insider knowledge and accounting for experiences in qualitative research
The methodology of friendship, has recently been adopted from the field of anthropology and on
balance more attention has been paid to informant-friendships, that is, those ties that develop because
of closeness and proximity during fieldwork. Indeed, Oakley’s incorporation of elements of friendship
into research interviews for women was described as ‘a “transition to friendship”, based on shared
gender subordination’ (2016, p. 196) and thus, about developing/assuming informant-friendships. In
this section, we discuss and assess some examples where alterity between researchers and participants
has been negotiated. By discussing research examples focused on subcultures and scenes where alterity
between researchers and participants has been negotiated, we identify some of the important elements
of a methodology of friendship that require consideration in sociological studies of culture.
In an essay tackling the idea of ‘insider knowledge’, Andy Bennett notes that ‘… several researchers
have cited […] pre-existing ties with their chosen research topic as a clear methodological advantage
over researches with no such connection’ (2003, p. 189). He notably refers to the work of Ben Malbon
(1999) on clubbing.4 Thus, Malbon states that his prior belonging to this particular music scene,
anchoring him as an ‘insider’, offers him the possibility to gather more accurate information from his
fieldwork enquiry:
… My own background as a clubber was, I believe, crucial in establishing my credentials as someone who was
both genuinely interested in and could readily emphasise with [clubbers’] experiences rather than merely as
someone who happened to be ‘doing a project’ on nightclubs as his ‘job’. (1999, p. 189)
Bennett (2003) is however sceptical of the notion of insider knowledge in the way it has been developed
by studies following the academic tradition of the Birmingham School of Contemporary Cultural
Studies (CCCS). He argues that there are inherent ethical and methodological issues to this approach,
and that there is little evidence about the effectiveness of such method. The most salient ethical issues
associated with insider knowledge include the possibility of peer pressure or coercion associated with
having insider knowledge as a friend or member of a shared (sub)culture where, as Browne suggests,
there is ‘a sense of duty or empathy related to participants’ own experiences of undertaking research’
(2003, p. 137). Moreover, there is the potential for exploitative relations because both parties may not
be fully aware of what the appropriate boundary should be in terms of disclosure and thus whether
informed consent has been adequately provided. Pointing out the pitfalls of potential methodological
biases in particular, including the lack of critical evaluation and genuine reflexivity about the ‘methodological advantages’ that such insider knowledge delivers within the research process ‘beyond anything
more than an anecdotal sense’ (2002, p. 461), Bennett calls for a greater concern for the ‘social actors
at the center of [the] research’ (2003, p. 195).
Bennett’s critique of the notion of insider knowledge as developed by cultural studies theorists is the
basis upon which an account of the ‘methodology of friendship’ can be developed. Indeed, by inspecting
the ethical implications of the relationship researchers have with their informants and by carefully
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
429
examining the degree to which friendship as method manifests itself prior to or during fieldwork, the
potential of the methodology of friendship for sociological knowledge can be uncovered. Although
it may create a more complex set of ethical considerations with regard to the meaning of informed
consent for instance, there is wider acknowledgement that informed consent is an ongoing process in
research anyway where the mode and method of how it is negotiated and achieved is specific to each
research context, rather than being a straightforward, one-time agreement (Wiles, Crow, Charles, &
Heath, 2007). Thus, if considered carefully, ‘insider knowledge’ does not jeopardise the ethical and
ideological dimensions of sociological research to gather deeper discourses. On the contrary, insider
knowledge conditions the inception of principles of friendship within the empirical fieldwork. Several
existing accounts have reflexively pointed out the advantages of drawing on insider knowledge and
the methodology of friendship in qualitative research (see Brewer, 2000; Edwards, 2002; Hodkinson,
2005; Kong, Mahoney, & Plummer, 2002; Merton, 1972; Taylor, 2011; Wolcott, 1999). These discussions have triggered the implementation of this method within various aspects of qualitative enquiries.
While no magical recipe exists to ensure a productive management of alterity between the researcher
and their informants, the ‘methodology of friendship’ is a toolkit that researchers can appropriate
and adapt to the particularities of their specific research, in order to obtain conclusive results and
maintain an ethical position. Indeed, the methodology of friendship provides different reflexive tools
that researchers can adopt and adapt to the particular case study they embed themselves into. This
toolkit does not differ from simply having insider knowledge, but it rationalises such approach and
enables an upstream reflexive and methodological process that precedes the collection of empirical
data. In addition to enabling access to a variety of practices that individuals are culturally embedded
within, another element of this toolkit is the relative level of intimacy – the degree of emotional and/
or cognitive closeness (Jamieson, 2011) – afforded by friend–informant or informant–friend relations
which can potentially disrupt elements of competitive individualism and status battles that often configure cultural research where there is a tendency for music/culture to be the means of identity claims.
The empirical work conducted by Jodie Taylor on the Queer scene in Brisbane (Australia) provides
a persuasive discussion of the methodology of friendship through the friend-informant route. By
actively participating in the Brisbane Queer scene as an ‘intimate-insider’, Taylor forged friendships
with some of its members (2011, p. 4). Such involvement in the scene configures her approach as a
researcher, which brings her to consider the management of the relationship with her informants and
the type of data she gathers. Drawing on the work of Roseneil (1993), Taylor identifies three advantages to conducting insider research: ‘deeper levels of understanding afforded by prior knowledge;
knowing the lingo or native speak of field participants and thus being “empirically literate”’ (2011, p.
6). Despite some issues relating to the ‘dilemmas of intimacy’, including ‘professional and personal
ethical conduct, accountability, the potential for data distortion’, ‘role displacement or confusion and
the vulnerability of friendship’, as well as the interpretative challenges associated with intimacy (2011,
p. 8), Taylor shows the benefits of the method of friendship to gather more accurate and detailed data.
She concludes that:
Regular and intimate contact [with informants] not only results in more opportunities to gather data, but it also
increases one’s level of perception in relation to body language and non-verbal communication; sensitive or covert
topics; detecting false-truths; emotive behavior; the degrees of affect that something may have upon someone […];
logics of taste and rationality; an informant’s self-image and their performative attempts at displaying this; and
their intended meaning which may sometimes be obscured by incongruous or abstruse language, but is able to
be referentially decoded through the researcher’s intimate understanding of past events and/or their knowledge
of the informant’s personal history. (2011, p. 11)
By negotiating alterity with her informants, Taylor found herself in the position of critically examining the embellished ‘truths’. Thus, she argues that informants had fewer possibilities to impress her
in their discourses about the Queer scene. Coffey concurs when she argues that, ‘… friendship can
help to clarify the inherent tensions of the fieldwork experience and sharpen our abilities for critical
reflection’ (1999, p. 47). Despite what she sees as a risk of ‘bias’, Taylor shows how the methodology of
430
R. NOWAK AND J. HAYNES
friendship helped her gather a better sense of any process of continuity or disruption that occurred
within the Queer scene.
Other studies have drawn upon principles of insider knowledge while succeeding in maintaining
a critical distance towards the informants. One compelling instance is Siokou and Moore’s (2008)
scrutiny of the rave scene in Melbourne (Australia) in which they aim to understand the structural
changes in the scene from the perspectives of long-term participants. As a raver, Siokou has attended
‘… 10 rave/dance parties and 26 clubs’ within the 16 months of her fieldwork enquiry, and she has
spent ‘substantial amounts of time at post-event “recovery” parties and in private residences’ (Siokou &
Moore, 2008, p. 51). Despite Siokou’s important involvement in the scene, Siokou and Moore develop
a critical and reflexive perspective on claims of ‘authentic belonging’ to a scene that the ravers make.
Taking the example of one of Siokou’s ‘research friends’ (i.e. friend-informants) Chloe, Siokou and
Moore write: ‘[her] authentic identity is based on participation in an idealised and now defunct golden
era, which is inaccessible to “young kids”’ (2008, p. 56).
Similarly, Overell (2010, 2011) associates a long and personal involvement in the Melbourne grindcore/death metal music scene with a critical perspective on its display of masculinity and brutal
affective belonging. About belonging to the scene, she writes: ‘[h]aving been a member of the scene
since 2003, in “fan” capacity, I drew on personal contacts and employed a “snowball” methodology to
broaden the sample’ (2010, p. 81). Her close ties to the scene however do not represent a risk of bias
as she maintains a critical perspective on the performative masculinity,
… through its brutal sensibility, Melbourne grindcore becomes a masculine scene. This consideration of
Melbourne grindcore is neat. Indeed, in terms of representation, brutal masculinity blasts from every t-shirt,
lyric and line of on-stage patter. (Overell, 2011, p. 205).
The common trend running through the above examples of Overell (2010, 2011), Siokou and Moore
(2008) and Taylor (2011), relates to how they all collect deep insights from their friend-informants while maintaining an ethical and critical perspective. Indeed, it is also important to note that
researchers, as Browne (2003) suggests, do not necessarily have the same views and opinions or even
common lifestyles as friend-informants. Sameness and difference as binaries that define power relations in research should always be subject to ongoing analytical scrutiny and as we reiterated above,
these relations are not straightforward. However, while it is problematic to assume that shared social
characteristics provide privileged access to knowledge in research, it may be the case that at different
points during the research, friendship and/or shared characteristics provide advantage and become
more central to the dynamics, access and quality of the research space.
All the accounts discussed in this section use the methodology of friendship on the basis of a strong
personal involvement in a cultural scene. We intend to go further by exploring the potential benefits
of the methodology of friendship by also discussing its implementation in semi-structured interviews,
which is the focus of the next section.
4. The possibility of friendship within semi-structured interviews
Semi-structured interviews typically touch on the ‘how’ of peoples’ lives (see Fontana & Frey, 2005), or
the ‘shape’ of facts – in contrast with the ‘material’ of facts that is the object of quantitative methods (see
De Certeau, 1990 [1980]). It is a methodological tool that has been used within sociological contexts
since the early 1900s although it has been constituted within broad shifting philosophical phases that
have shaped its epistemological meaning and value, i.e. ‘from positivist rigour, through interpretive
reflexivity, to multiplicity and politicization’ (Edwards & Holland, 2013, p. 12). It attempts to gather
discourses on the various ways in which informants conduct their lives, process their thoughts and
interact with their environments and their peers. This method sheds light upon data that would otherwise be overlooked, such as ‘people’s subjective experiences and attitudes’ (Peräkylä, 2005, p. 869).
However, the principles defining semi-structured interviews are not a recipe that researchers can
repeatedly apply while expecting similar outcomes. Semi-structured interviews require the constant
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
431
negotiation of alterity between the researcher and their informants, as well as the management of the
moments within which the method unfolds.
The dynamics of researcher–informant relations within semi-structured interviews are subjective
in that, not only are researchers a necessary part of the research field and interview encounter, in
qualitative research more broadly the subjective nature of the data gathered is taken for granted. The
challenge faced by the qualitative researcher is then to develop a self-reflexive and critical approach
of their own presence in the fieldwork, in order to make sure that this presence is not disruptive, nor
problematic. Qualitative research is ‘contextually contingent’ (Wheatley, 1994) on the relationship
developed between the researcher and their informants, because ‘… the sensibilities of interviewing
are altered with the changing social phenomena that constitute the “interview”’ (Kong et al., 2002,
p. 240). Mason concurs when she writes: ‘[m]ost qualitative research operates from the perspective
that knowledge is situated and contextual, and therefore the job of the interview is to ensure that
the relevant contexts are brought into focus so that situated knowledge can be produced’ (2002, p.
62). Thus, interviews must be constructed as a complex assemblage – by definition, they consist of a
phenomenological encounter between a researcher and their informants. Scheurich suggests that ‘the
conventional, positivist view of interviewing vastly underestimates the complexity, uniqueness, and
indeterminateness of each one-to-one human interaction’ (1995, p. 241). The empirical encounters are
defined by a set of signs that each participant reads and interprets accordingly, and which determines
the course of the conversation.
Despite the potential disruptions occurring during semi-structured interviews however, there are
different approaches to maximise the probability of fruitful empirical encounters and over the last
decade or so, many accounts have focused on the topic of semi-structured interviews. Similar to Oakley
(1981), Fontana and Frey (2005) argue that the neutrality that once used to define semi-structured
interviews is now to be questioned. They advocate for the development of ‘empathetic interviews’,
which entails ‘taking a stance, contrary to the scientific image of interviewing, which is based on the
concept of neutrality’ (Fontana & Frey, 2005, p. 696). They suggest that empathy improves the level
of understanding between the researcher and their informants. However, compared to interviews
with non-friend informants where it takes time to develop trust, established friendship can facilitate
flexibility, trust, stronger commitment to research and more authentic dialogue within interviews
as there is greater willingness to respond in ways that are ‘similar to everyday interactions’ (Browne,
2003, p. 137). Moreover, rather than conceiving of qualitative semi-structured interviews through a
‘hit and run’ framework (see Browne, 2003; Skeggs, 1999), where the qualitative research encounter
is a one-sided relationship enabling the researcher to gather data for their enquiry, interviews with
friends can result not only in more profound and individual testimonies of daily experience, they
also produce mutually beneficial outcomes, subject of course to rigorous ethical and methodological
procedural accountability and reflexivity.
In this article, we wish to go further. We draw on and extend the principles from accounts discussed
by Browne (2003) and Taylor (2011) to conceptualise the implementation of the methodology of
friendship within semi-structured interviews. In developing a pro-active approach to the uncertainty
of semi-structured interviews, the researcher is not simply reactive to the conditions and unfolding of
the encounters with their informants, but they derive benefit from the situated nature of knowledge
by fostering a favourable environment for the gathering of information. Within the moment of the
interview, researchers have to draw on their prior knowledge and use it for the sake of data gathering.
While there are always assumptions made about participants’ prior knowledge in research, which
shapes how the conversation develops and the manner through which the communication is conducted
(Nowicka & Ryan, 2015), friendship-led communication in semi-structured interviews offers scope
for exploring prevailing knowledge pathways with less risk of disruption or tension because of trust,
flexibility and the potential for a more authentic dialogue because, as suggested by Browne (2003, p.
137) above, there is more preparedness to respond in ways that are ‘similar to everyday interactions’.
Hence, rather than viewing their subjectivity as constituting a potential risk of bias in the conversation, it should be viewed as an instrument to gather more information. Having said that, the process
432
R. NOWAK AND J. HAYNES
of ‘making the familiar strange’ (Wright-Mills, 1962; see also Silverman, 2007) is nonetheless an
important aspect of subsequent stages of research where data analysis demands that the relations of
power defined through ‘sameness and difference’ afforded by friendship and/or shared social status
are taken into consideration.
In the next section, we look more closely at trajectories of the methodology of friendship as they
have developed within the context of our research. The first, where experiences of popular music in
everyday life were shared and where friendship evolved over time and the second, where an assemblage of personal ties was the basis of data generation but which contributed to the production of
sociological knowledge that increased distance from the research space.
5. Cases studies – friend-informants and informant-friends in music research
The discussion about adapting the methodology of friendship within semi-structured interviews is
critical for research in music sociology, to understand the ways in which music is embedded within
personal and social dynamics. A call for further development of ethnographic tools within research on
popular music was made by Sara Cohen (1993). Cohen considers that ethnography prevents popular
music researchers from developing essentialist accounts of music and its diffusion. Drawing on Geertz
(1975, p. 17), she argues that interviews with informants are essential to understand the articulation
between music and individual behaviours (Cohen, 1993; see also Grenier & Guilbault, 1990). Cohen’s
(1993) call has found an echo in the writing of Grazian (2004) who sees opportunities for the development of ethnography in popular studies. Acknowledging the empirical work that has been carried
out by popular music theorists – notably in relation to the fields of production, consumption and lifestyles – Grazian points towards new opportunities for ethnographic studies in the research of popular
music. He writes: ‘Like music, ethnography is an interpretative practice; it requires participation and
improvisation; its presentation invites a multiplicity of meanings as well as self-reflection’ (Grazian,
2004, p. 206). In that regard, the two case studies detailed below are examples of possible new ways to
engage with friend-informants and informant-friends in music research. We thus critically reflect upon
our empirical research and the outcomes of using the methodology of friendship in music sociology.
5.1. Uncovering everyday practices of music consumption in the digital age
The first example draws on two sets of qualitative studies conducted in Brisbane and on the Gold
Coast (Queensland, Australia), which explore everyday music listening practices and the various
ways through which individuals access music, listen to music and are affected by it. The first set of
interviews was conducted between May 2010 and July 2011 with 24 informants, and the second in
June and July 2014 with 11 informants, six of whom had already been interviewed during the first
enquiry. The methodology of friendship enabled Nowak to develop some personal ties with several
of his informants based on shared musical knowledge and cultural practices of downloading music.
He managed to interview some of them again on the same topic three or four years later. Thus, this
methodological tool not only provided more detailed discourses on mundane experiences, it also enabled him to develop a longitudinal perspective in his research by comparing some of his informants’
relationships with music over time as informant-friends. Empirical evidence from this research can
be found in various publications (Nowak, 2015, 2016a, 2016b). The discussion here focuses on the
actual ways in which the methodology of friendship has been deployed in the context of this research,
and how it has been discursively favourable for the research outcomes.
Nowak’s sociological investigation covers the topics related to the sonic diffusion of music in everyday life as well as the interactions that individuals have with music technologies in the age of important
digital transformations (see 2014, 2015). In that regard, he brings together analyses such as those by
Bull (2007) on uses of the iPod, with those by DeNora (2000) or Hennion et al. (2000) on everyday
music listening practices (see Nowak, 2014). In the context of this research, the use of the methodology of friendship created the necessary conditions to gather more details about the mundane ways in
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
433
which individuals interact with music, from downloading it illegally to buying a vinyl disc, listening
to it on the commute and being affected by it in various fashions, and to move beyond any social
connotations associated with music (in terms of possible issues of cultural legitimacy for instance),
which remains a site of distinction and/or of ‘competitive individualism’ (Hesmondhalgh, 2008, 2013).
Indeed, uncovering the mundane practices of music consumption is critical to highlight the multiple
meanings that music takes in everyday life, which was the core objective of the research. However, as
Hesmondhalgh (2008, p. 238) argues, ‘there are two ways in which music might be the basis of status
battles in modern society: in terms of emotional sensitivity of its consumers, and in terms of its basis
for hedonistic pleasure’. The methodology of friendship was implemented as a way to avoid any status battle, or competitive individualism, about music, its meanings and uses. Thus, in this research,
the use of the methodology of friendship helped seize the most personal in a mundane sense. It was
about finding the means – through alterity and friendship – to encourage informants to talk about
the ‘boring’ facets that make the fabric of social phenomena.
Another crucial aspect to consider is the ways in which individuals access music. In the digital age,
the variable of music technologies problematises the gathering of data on music consumption. Illegal
downloading of music has become a preponderant instrument to access music content. Although the
practice of illegally downloading music quickly became mundane after its advent in the late 1990s,
divulging such sensitive information about such practices to a stranger could be problematic for some
informants. Nowak took this element into account and found that, although they were ‘strangers’
through the methodology of friendship and thus by shifting the tone of the exchange towards an
informal conversation that facilitated trust and flexibility, participants were more willing to engage in
conversations that are like everyday interactions between friends. Browne (2003, p. 137) highlights that
such conditions may enable participants to be more willing to disagree and not supply the preferred
responses in a way that non-friend data are not or at least takes a bit longer to establish.
The methodology of friendship was deployed as a toolkit during semi-structured interviews, in
order to make conversations with strangers as informal as possible. Nowak tried to reciprocate the
tenets of the methodology without a prolonged involvement in a cultural scene. However, the shared
culture between Nowak and their research participants meant that they were able to ‘press further’ on
certain issues. As a result, the research project provided evidence of everyday consumption practices of
music in the digital age of music technologies (be these technologies legal or illegal), as well as detailing
the different configurations of music taste (beyond questions of cultural legitimacy and ‘competitive
individualism’) (Hesmondhalgh, 2013) and the relationship between music and the various moments
of everyday life. Thus, this empirical research resulted in a contextualisation of music consumption
practices (thus comprising both mundane uses of music and illegal downloading practices) within
everyday life and consumers’ daily habits and practices, whereas other research has largely focused
on one type of music consumption, neglecting other technologies and uses of music (Nowak, 2014).
In the end, this methodology resulted in Nowak developing particular friendships with some of
his informants. Indeed, Nowak encountered some of the informants at music concerts or festivals,
and then maintained contact with some of these informants on social media. Informal conversations
continued on the topic of music consumption and music taste for a while, and this even enabled
Nowak to follow the development of their consumption practices over time by interviewing some of
them again on the same topic a few years later (see Nowak, 2015).
5.2. Friendship and knowledge production: moving from the inside to the outside
The second research example which helps to illustrate how the methodology of friendship shapes
research relations and the production of knowledge comes from Haynes (2013). This research focused
on the production and consumption of world music. Having been involved on the fringes of musical
and cultural activity in the south-west of England and having personal ties with musicians, DJs, promoters and managers who were actively involved in making money from their creative labour, Haynes
was able to access respondents through a combination of purposive and snowball sampling by utilising
434
R. NOWAK AND J. HAYNES
her ‘personal community’ (Pahl & Spencer, 2010) to gather detailed information about their views and
understanding of music. Through participant observation at festivals and gigs and 32 semi-structured
interviews from 1999 to 2001, Haynes explored the meaning, organisation and production of world
music and the extent to which ideas of racial and ethnic difference were invoked. Six people from
the original research sample were interviewed ten years later in 2009–2010 to determine whether the
meaning and organisation of world music had changed significantly in the intervening period.
Not only is the starting point of this second example different to Nowak’s because the idea for the
research emerged from Haynes’ embeddedness within the music scene thus enabling the ability to
draw on personal ties to access a wider sample and in some cases, to participate in semi-structured
interviews, the trajectory of the on-going research relations also vary. Explaining the impetus for the
research in a previous publication, Haynes suggests that it derived from
the fact that although the dominant political views and cultural values expressed by musicians and consumers
alike (with whom I had previously come in contact) displayed an antiracist political sensibility, their aesthetic
values and musical preferences revealed traces of biological racism and fixed notions of cultural difference.
Moreover, unlike other contexts for the study of racism as typically centred around explicit processes of exclusion, the world music context suggested a social space shaped by racialized processes of exoticization that were
ambiguous and less explicit. (Haynes, 2010, 83)
So although having shared cultural knowledge of the local world music context as an ‘insider’ provided
the ability to access respondents and make sense of world music discourses, as a graduate research
student examining theoretical notions of race, cultural difference and racism from within academic
discourses, positioned Haynes too as an ‘outsider’. Indeed, over the course of the research through
data generation, analysis and critical reflection, the hierarchical meanings and cultural values associated with the classification of music that were emerging became a source of tension which eventually
increased the distance between the research and the cultural context. The distancing came about not
because there was a ‘preferred’ set of responses that Haynes was expecting to hear, rather it was the
realisation that there was far less common ground than had previously been assumed. Thus, the negotiation between her ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ sensibilities shifted considerably because of the personal
and professional questions the research raised about what it means to participate in a music scene
(however peripheral) and share cultural knowledge as friends.
Aspects of these changes can be conceptualised through the process of othering where, as Bott
(2010) describes, differences take on a heightened significance within the context of emergent political
incongruities between the researcher and participants that were not known at the outset. Researching
British migrants in Tenerife employed as lap-dancers in clubs, Bott (2010, p. 160, 161) asks,
But what happens when research subjects, whose ‘difference’ from the investigator had initially seemed relatively
insignificant, become increasingly ‘other’ to her through the very data collected? As we get to know the people
we are researching, our investments in them change. Inevitably we begin to identify/disidentify, like/dislike,
familiarize/otherize and this impacts our representations of them in relation to ourselves when we write up our
ethical worries and interview data.
Bott was able to examine the differential effects of her own personal and professional subjectivity on
data being gathered and the research narrative she eventually produced. The lap-dancing clubs were
a source of political discomfort because they ‘involved the open sexual objectification of naked or
semi-naked women’, she also questioned the related power differentials that were intensified by the
nature of this research setting and which provoked anxiety regarding the ‘exploitative implications of
hierarchical research relations’ (Bott, 2010, p. 164, 165). In other words, although feminist and political
views informed Bott’s critical position in related to the lap-dancing clubs, nevertheless, her position
as academic researcher had benefitted from women sharing their personal experiences about their
working lives as in her view, sexual objects.
The shifts between insider and outsider, friend and non-friend suggest that negotiating alterity
within the context of semi-structured interviews goes beyond a methodology of friendship conceived
as fostering research conditions that are ‘open, multivoiced, and emotionally rich’ (Tillmann-Healy,
2003, p. 734). The production of knowledge through friendship reveals other conditions that are
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
435
seldom championed within the context of qualitative research: disagreement and disjuncture. On the
former condition, Browne’s research is again instructive as she argues that ‘research spaces, may be
similar to everyday interactions where dialogues take a variety of formats’, as such interactions within
research can also incorporate disagreements just as interactions with friends in everyday situations
also consist of disagreements (2003, p. 137). Reflecting on this in relation to her semi-structured
interviews, Haynes concluded that the shift in knowledge relations was not simply produced through
disagreement. Instead, it was more instructive to frame it as an important disjuncture in the perspectives being produced through researcher–informant relations and thus across interview data and
compared to fieldwork observations.
According to Lindhof and Taylor (2002, p. 242), disjunctures in research which capture the differences in meanings being produced by a range of data and methods, ‘prompt the researcher to account
for a more complex social reality than was first imagined’. As such, the negotiation of alterity between
Haynes and the friend-informants, highlighted differences in their perspectives of a music scene
thereby increasing the critical distance to the research space. The ensuing knowledge produced from
these shifting relations highlighted the intersection of biological, culturalist and postmodern discursive
repertoires of ethnic and racial difference reproduced through world music. Thus, the methodology of
friendship was beneficial for data gathering because it helped Haynes get a stronger sense of how music
articulates contradictory social dynamics, which also explains the distancing between the researcher
and some of the people interviewed. Research relations in studies that depend on friend-informants
therefore are likely to be complex given that, in addition to being a friend there may also be shared or
different social characteristics affecting such relations – i.e. research relations defined through both
axes of power – such that ‘at times one can be both an “insider” and an “outsider”, same and different.
How these connections and disjunctures come to matter differs in relation to situations, contexts and
individuals’ (Browne, 2003, p. 136). In this case, the need for academic scrutiny of discourses of ethnoracial difference produced through in-depth interviews began to take precedence over opportunities
for experiencing music with some of the participants and ultimately, the shared activities that had
been central in defining the existing friend–informant relations inevitably shifted.
6. Concluding thoughts
Revoking the idea that research is an objectified social space that researchers enter temporarily, we
argue in this paper that alterity is a key issue for social scientists to negotiate in their empirical approach.
The position that researchers adopt with their informants is subject to constant refining, and a reflexive
approach to alterity enables the proper adjustments to ensure an ethical position in the field, as well
as the gathering of more detailed data.
In the critical discussion above, we have attempted to show that contrary to popular methodological
folklore there is a far more significant role for friendship within the use of semi-structured interviews
in the study of contemporary music and listening practices. As a toolkit that researchers can adopt
and adapt, the methodology of friendship represents a potential for gathering more detailed data
and for offering a perspectival shift in what we understand to be our field of enquiry at the outset,
particularly in the case of music as highlighted above. The accounts of Browne (2003), Taylor (2011),
Siokou and Moore (2008) and Overell (2010, 2011) all suggest that conducting empirical enquiries
with friend-informants results in greater depth of analyses by improving the interpretative practice
through shared knowledge. While they are confronted with issues about what to include in their
writings without compromising their positions in the field, they also prove that being an ‘intimate
insider’ is not contradictory with developing a critical perspective about some of the practices occurring within these particular scenes.
Furthermore, by drawing on our own music research first we have shown that the important detail
of and analytical insights about listening and consuming practices in this age of significant digital and
musical transformation can only readily be acquired by side-stepping those distortions that emerge
through forms of distinction and attempts at positioning oneself in social space. Semi-structured
436
R. NOWAK AND J. HAYNES
interviews focused on music invariably invoke some kind of display of knowledge and taste preferences,
and thus by establishing friendship or closer ties in the course of the research may circumvent such
positioning strategies enabling other discourses to be revealed. Second, invoking a methodology of
friendship as the access point for research triggered a critical and self-searching scrutiny of a social
world that may have initially been taken at face value. Where once there had been an assumption of
shared values and understanding this can change through the negotiation of alterity taking place during
the interview process. As such the methodology of friendship was shown not to follow a predictable
path but that its adoption can also reveal how the negotiation of research/friend relations can have a
critical impact on the production of knowledge.
Notes
1.
One of the earliest discussions of friendship as method such as that of Tillmann-Healy (2003), identifies the
ways that the friendship method builds on the tenets of interpretivism along with feminist principles and
poststructural work that enables the deconstruction of the researcher/researched binary. Enquiries based on
the method of friendship are thus described as ‘open, multivoiced, and emotionally rich’ (2003, p. 734).
2.
It was also a critical focus within debates about the principles of a feminist methodology (see for instance
Dunscombe & Jessop, 2002; Oakley, 1981, 2016).
3.
Keeping the two axes of power analytically separate is important as researcher – informant relations can reflect
a number of possible combinations of shared or different social characteristics and/or friendship trajectories.
4.
‘Clubbing’ is also the focus of Thornton’s work (1995). Nevertheless, despite claiming an ‘outsider’ status to the
clubbers, Thornton does not explain how access was achieved, and how her outsider status impacted upon her
data collection and knowledge production. See Bennett (2002) for a critique of her work.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Raphaël Nowak, is a postdoctoral research fellow in Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University.
His research interests are music, genres, technologies and heritage.
Jo Haynes, is a senior lecturer at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol. Her
research interests: music, racialisation, ethnicity and creative labour.
ORCID
Raphaël Nowak
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2017-3091
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7462-8859
Jo Haynes
References
Beer, D. (2009). Can you dig it?: Some reflections on the sociological problems associated with being uncool. Sociology,
43(6), 1151–1162.
Bennett, A. (2002). Researching youth culture and popular music: A methodological critique. British Journal of Sociology,
53(3), 451–466.
Bennett, A. (2003). The use of insider knowledge in ethnographic research on contemporary youth music scenes. In A.
Bennett, M. Cieslik, & S. Miles (Eds.), Researching youth (pp. 186–199). London: Palgrave.
Bennett, A. (2005). Culture and everyday life. London: Sage.
Bott, E. (2010). Favourites and others: Reflexivity and the shaping of subjectivities and data in qualitative research.
Qualitative Research, 10(2), 159–173.
Brewer, J. (2000). Ethnography. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Browne, K. (2003). Negotiations and fieldworkings: Friendship and feminist research. ACME: An International E-Journal
for Critical Geographies, 2(2), 132–146.
Bull, M. (2007). Sound moves: IPod culture and urban experience. London: Routledge.
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
437
Coffey, A. (1999). The ethnographic self: Fieldwork and the representation of identity. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Cohen, S. (1993). Ethnography and popular music studies. Popular Music, 12(2), 123–138.
De Certeau, M. (1990 [1980]). L’Invention du Quotidien [the practice of everyday life]. Arts de Faire. Folio Poche: Paris.
DeNora, T. (2000). Music in everyday life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dunscombe, J., & Jessop, J. (2002). Doing rapport, and the ethics of ‘faking friendship’. In M. Mauthner, M. Birch, J.
Jessop and T. Miller (Eds.), Ethics in qualitative research (pp. 108–122). London: Sage.
Edwards, B. (2002). Deep insider research. Qualitative Research Journal, 2(1), 71–84.
Edwards, R., & Holland, J. (2013). What is qualitative interviewing?. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Fontana, A., & Frey, J. H. (2005). The interview, from neutral stance to political involvement. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln
(Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (pp. 695–727). London: Sage.
Geertz, C. (1975). The interpretation of culture. London: Hutchinson.
Grazian, D. (2004). Opportunities for ethnography in the sociology of music. Poetics, 32, 197–210.
Grenier, L., & Guilbault, J. (1990). ‘Authority’ revisited: The ‘other’ in anthropology and popular music studies.
Ethnomusicology, 34, 381–397.
Haynes, J. (2010). In the Blood: The Racializing Tones of Music Categorization. Cultural Sociology, 4(1), 81–100.
Haynes, J. (2013). Music, Difference and the Residue of Race, New York: Routledge.
Hennion, A., Maisonneuve, S., & Gomart, H. (2000). Les Figures de l’Amateur. Formes, Objets, Pratiques de l’Amour de
la Musique Aujourd’hui. Paris: La Documentation Française.
Hesmondhalgh, D. (2008). Towards a critical understanding of music, emotion and self‐identity. Consumption Markets
& Culture, 11(4), 329–343.
Hesmondhalgh, D. (2013). Why music matters. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
Hodkinson, P. (2005). ‘Insider research’ in the study of youth cultures. Journal of Youth Studies, 8(2), 131–149.
Jamieson, L. (2011). Intimacy as a concept: Explaining social change in the context of globalisation or another form of
ethnocentricism? Sociological Research Online, 16(4), 1–13.
Kassabian, A. (2013). Ubiquitous listening: Affect, attention and distributed subjectivity. Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Kong, T., Mahoney, D., & Plummer, K. (2002). Queering the interview. In J. Gubrium & J. Holstein (Eds.), Handbook
of qualitative research: Context and method (pp. 239–258). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Lilliestam, L. (2013). Research on music listening: From typologies to interviews with real people. Volume!, 10(1), 1–23.
Lindhof, T. R., & Taylor, B. C. (2002). Qualitative communication research methods. London: Sage.
Malbon, B. (1999). Clubbing: Dancing, ecstasy and vitality. London: Routledge.
Mason, J. (2002). Qualitative researching. London: Sage.
Martin, P. (2006). Music and the sociological gaze. Art worlds and cultural production, Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Merton, R. (1972). Insiders and outsiders: A chapter in the sociology of knowledge. In R. Merton (Ed.), Varieties of
political expression in sociology (pp. 9–47). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Nowak, R. (2014). Investigating the interactions between individuals and music technologies within contemporary modes
of music consumption, First Monday, special edition ‘Napster, 15 Years on: Rethinking Digital Music Distribution’,
19:10.
Nowicka, M., & Ryan, L. (2015). Beyond insiders and outsiders in migration research: Rejecting a priori commonalities.
FQS Forum Qualitative Social Research, 16(2), 18.
Nowak, R. (2015). Consuming Music in the Digital Age. Technologies, Roles and Everyday Life, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Nowak, R. (2016a). When is a discovery? Towards a critical analysis of ‘discoveries’ in music consumption, Popular
Communication, special issue on Music and Discovery, 14(3), 137–45.
Nowak, R. (2016b). The multiplicity of iPod cultures in everyday life: Uncovering the hybridity of the iconic object.
Journal for Cultural Research, 20(2), 189–203.
Oakley, A. (1981). Interviewing women: A contradiction in terms? In H. Roberts (Ed.), Doing feminist research (pp.
310–316). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Oakley, A. (2016). Interviewing women again: Power, time and the gift. Sociology, 50(1), 195–213.
Overell, R. (2010). Brutal belonging in Melbourne’s grindcore scene. Studies in Symbolic Interactionism, 35, 79–99.
Overell, R. (2011). ‘[I] hate girls and emo[tion]s’: Negotiating masculinity in grindcore music. Popular Music History,
6(1–2), 198–223.
Owton, H., & Allen-Collinson, J. (2014). Close but not too close: Friendship as method(ology) in ethnographic research
encounters. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 43(3), 283–305.
Pahl, R., & Spencer, L. (2010). Family, friends and personal communities; changing models-in-the-mind (Working Paper
No. 2010-01). Colchester: Institute for Social & Economic Research, University of Essex.
Peräkylä, A. (2005). Analyzing talk and text. In N. Denzin & Y. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research
(pp. 869–886). London: Sage.
Rawlins, W. K. (2008). The compass of friendship: Narratives, identities and dialogues. London: Sage.
438
R. NOWAK AND J. HAYNES
Roseneil, S. (1993). Greenham revisited: Researching myself and my sisters. In D. Hobbs & T. May (Eds.), Interpreting
the field: Accounts of ethnography (pp. 177–208). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Savage, M., & Burrows, R. (2007). The coming crisis of empirical sociology. Sociology, 41(5), 885–899.
Scheurich, J. (1995). A postmodernist critique of research interviewing. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in
Education, 8, 239–252.
Silverman, D. (2007). A very short, fairly interesting and reasonably cheap book about qualitative research. London: Sage.
Siokou, C., & Moore, D. (2008). ‘This is not a rave!’ Changes in the commercialized Melbourne rave/dance party scene.
Youth Studies Australia, 27(3), 50–57.
Skeggs, B. (1999). Matter out of place: Visibility and sexualities in leisure spaces. Leisure Studies, 18(3), 213–232.
Taylor, J. (2011). The intimate insider: Negotiating the ethics of friendship when doing insider research. Qualitative
Research, 11(1), 3–22.
Thornton, S. (1995) Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Tillmann-Healy, L. M. (2003). Friendship as method. Qualitative Inquiry, 9(5), 729–749.
Travers, M. (2009). New methods, old problems: A sceptical view of innovation in qualitative research. Qualitative
Research, 9(2), 161–179.
Urry, J. (2006). Complexity. Theory, Culture and Society, 23(2–3), 111–115.
Wheatley, E. (1994). Dances with feminist: Truth, dares and ethnographic stares. Women’s Studies International Forum,
17(4), 421–423.
Wiles, R., Crow, G., & Pain, H. (2011). Innovation in qualitative research methods: A narrative review. Qualitative
Research, 11(5), 587–604.
Wiles, R., Crow, G., Charles, V., & Heath, S. (2007). Informed consent and the research process: Following rules or
striking balances? Sociological Research Online, 12(2), 1–12.
Wolcott, H. F. (1999). Ethnography: A way of seeing. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.
Wright-Mills, C. (1962). The sociological imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Copyright of International Journal of Social Research Methodology is the property of
Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv
without the copyright holder’s express written permission. However, users may print,
download, or email articles for individual use.