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Integrated Research Methods in Gender and Migration StudiesOne of the aims of this project has been to investigate and show how research methods drawing both on the Social Sciences and the Humanities rather than being strictly located in one domain can be used to provide new insights into important research fields. Our project has shown that most research methods – although commonly set out in individual terms (eg ‘interviewing’, ‘discourse analysis’, ‘archival methods’) – involve in fact multiple methods. For instance, virtually all data collected either qualitatively or quantitatively has to be textualized at some point in the research process, and is then the object of close textual analysis, a method strongly associated with the Humanities. Thus the contributions collected here demonstrate that research methods are not readily dividable into individual activities that thereby encompass the research conducted for a given method; instead research has to be viewed as a staged process which requires different methods at different stages of the research from design, through data collection to analysis and presentation, and it is this processual structure that is the integrating mechanism for multiple research methods into a project whole, as much as the fact that all methods themselves have multi stages attached to their use. In order to show how different research methods can lead to the illumination of an issue from very different angles the project partners decided to focus on a given topic – gender and migration studies – as a means of bringing together Humanities and Social Sciences research methods in a field – migration studies – that is frequently regarded as the preserve of the Social Sciences. However, as the contributions on narrative and visual methods, for instance, make clear, research methods from the Humanities can readily be used to analyse aspects of migration studies that would not be captured by a quantitative approach, for example. Gabriele Griffin, April 2007 |
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