Staff Research Seminar: Sampling and other design issues in researching precarity and exclusion in post-industrial Yorkshire

I will be discussing the challenges entailed in designing a study to investigate the impact of material deprivation and social exclusion on families, especially exclusion  resulting from precarious work. This is a small-scale, qualitative pilot which focuses on the experiences of low-income families reliant on insecure work, especially on young people's trajectories through school and their decisions around post-compulsory education and work in the Sheffield City Region. The study will recruit students from the Sheffield FE college, and one of the selection criteria is that one parent or guardian is also willing to participate in the study. Deciding this was the easy part! Given the difficulties and debates around defining precarious work it has been challenging to finalise inclusion criteria. To some extent, this has been resolved by relying on the Family Resource Survey, but some practical, ethical and conceptual challenges remain and it is on this set of challenges that the talk will focus.