The need to elicit public opinion about predefined topics is widespread in the social sciences, government and business. Traditional survey-based methods are being partly replaced by social media data mining but their potential and limitations are poorly understood. This article investigates this issue by introducing and critically evaluating a…

This study investigates how an interviewer's characteristics affect how respondents answer survey questions about democracy and political engagement. I analyze data from the 2008 Afrobarometer surveys, in which 810 interviewers surveyed 27,713 respondents across 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Using these data, I study how interviewer…

Trust is often treated as a binary where research participants either trust researchers or not, whereas in reality trust is multi-layered. Drawing on 10 months of fieldwork working with internally displaced persons and their non-displaced neighbours in rural Colombia, this article provides a more nuanced discussion of trust in research. It…

This article outlines how co-production might be understood as a utopian method, which both attends to and works against dominant inequalities. It suggests that it might be positioned 'within, against, and beyond' current configurations of power in academia and society more broadly. It develops this argument by drawing on recent research funded…

We assess the potential for mixing social research methods, based upon a materialist and micropolitical analysis of the research-assemblage and of what individual research techniques and methods do in practice. Applying a DeleuzoGuattarian toolkit of assemblages, affects and capacities, we document what happens when research methods and techniques…

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…

This study compares cost, completion times, and percent completion of electronic tablet (n = 244) to paper-based (n = 398) questionnaires administered to participants of scenic raft trips on the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park. We hypothesized e-tablet questionnaires would (1) cost less (2) be completed faster and (3) be completely filled…

Electronically assisted survey techniques offer several advantages over traditional survey techniques. However, they can also potentially introduce biases, such as coverage biases and measurement error. The current study compares the relative merits of two survey distribution and completion modes: email recruitment with internet completion; and…

This article tests whether collecting pile-sort data online produces results similar to those obtained with face-to-face methods. We collected pile sorts from 227 university students in the cultural domain of emotions. To test for mode and design effects, we randomly assigned participants to face-to-face or internet modes and to either a 15- or…

Snowball sampling is frequently advocated and employed by qualitative social researchers. Under certain circumstances, however, it is prone to faltering and even failure. Drawing on two research projects where the snowball failed to roll, the paper identifies reasons for this stasis. It goes on to argue that there are alternative forms of…

Mixed methods research is growing in acceptance and complexity, which translates into significant pedagogical challenges for teaching about mixed methods research. To address this challenge and to contribute to creating a pedagogical culture for teaching research methods, we developed a practically focused conceptual framework for describing the…

Engaging non-conventional gatekeepers such as the police presents both promises and perils. Although studies have relied on police data for researching suicide and other sensitive topics in Africa, there is a paucity of literature that explores or reflects on police gatekeeping and its research implications. This paper presents authors'…

In all parts of the world, researchers are addressing the colonial legacy of research. This article aims to contribute to the decolonisation of research in a sub-Saharan African context by exploring Ubuntu as an indigenous Southern African research paradigm. Drawing on lessons learnt from participatory action research with South African science…

In this article, we present the results of three question design experiments on inter-item correlations, which tested a grid design against a single-item design. The first and second experiments examined the inter-item correlations of a set with five and seven items, respectively, and the third experiment examined the impact of the question design…

Sequential explanatory mixed method design is the most frequently applied in both health and social sciences literature. It is denoted by 'QUAN [right arrow] qual' which represents the quantitative study occurs first and has greater weight in addressing the study's aims, and the qualitative study follows to explain quantitative results. Despite…