IJSRM’s 100th issue

We are delighted to mark the 100th issue of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology which happens to fall in the first issue of volume 18. The 100th issue is an opportune moment for us to pause and reflect on where we are at in terms of social research methods and methodology, and the kinds of debates that have filled the pages in this journal over the past 30 years.

Since the Journal was first published in 1998, so much has changed in social research that it is difficult to know where to begin. However, like many successful journals, this journal has seen more continuity in the editorial team than change. So, for example, one of the founding editors, Julia Brannen, only stepped down from the editorial team after over a decade, in 2011. We are grateful that she remains an active board member of the Journal, so her presence continues to influence the scholarship of its contents. Likewise, we thank Christina Hughes for her strong editorial input between 2011 and 2016; we are grateful to Christina for staying on the editorial board as well. This is the first editorial with Emma Uprichard on the team, who joins Malcolm Williams who has been part of the editorial team since 2002 and Ros Edwards, who was the other member of the founding editorial team. Our current editorial board similarly reflects a mix of long-standing members who have been part of ensuring that IJSRM maintains its high quality standards for a decade or so (such as Linda Bell, Bob Burgess, Nigel Fielding, Martyn Hammersley, Richard Lampard, Nick Moon) and others who have recently brought new areas of methodological and methods expertise to the board. Some of these more recent board members have come up through our College of Reviewers initiative, where early career researchers are able to hone their article review skills.

Since the journal was set up, the world itself has changed in important ways too. We note, for example, the first working draft of the human genome being announced in 2001. The first decade of the new millennium was the launch pad of Web 2.0 and along with it, new kinds of social media sites, such as Wikipedia (2001), Facebook (2004), Twitter (2006), Sina Weibo (2009), each allowing for a particular kind of social interaction, and as a social research data collection.

The consequences of the 2008 financial crisis still have an important impact on society; this was the same year that the Large Hadron Collider at Cern was switched on. There is an uncomfortable irony in the world’s biggest and most powerful machine being switched on to accelerate and control beams of particles and magnetic fields in the same year as it became all too obvious that, even with centuries of very detailed micro- and macro finance data collection across the world, it was still, supposedly, impossible to foresee one of the world’s biggest financial crashes in recent history. The fact that a small proportion of the world’s population benefited immensely from the crash at the expense of the vast majority of others is perhaps a warning of the kinds of outcomes that may been countered depending on the kinds of methods that are used to (not) know the social systems.

Continuing our brief retrospective on world events, we note also the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Since the Journal’s inception, there has also been a multitude of devastating environmental disasters, such as the Mozambique floods in 2000, Thailand’s horrendous 2004 Tsunami and Iceland’s big-long-named-Eyjafjallajökull volcano in 2010, to name but a few recent ones, each making the threat of climate change all the more present and increasingly local.

These events, and the many, many more not mentioned, all seep into the making and remaking the ‘social’ – what it is, how it emerges and is co-produced, and how it is known and researched. Throughout the same period of time, though, there are also many phenomena that have continued to permeate societies in spite of the many events and changes. The biological imperatives of air, food and water, creating waste, and the necessity of sleep, whilst all the time aging and ultimately dying, all remain intrinsic taken for granted ‘facts’ of being human, for instance. Far too many socio-political divisions, such as those produced by, for example, class, racism, sexism, intergenerational economic and cultural capital and lack thereof, illness, and disability and so on, remain worryingly as present as ever. Often, both within countries and especially between them, social divisions and the political mechanisms for intensifying polarisation locally and globally, have, perversely, intensified.

Some may wish to regard these various events and characteristics of as some of the inevitabilities of being and becoming in the world, which they may well be. The fact that social ills exist is but a fact of being human; all societies suffer from social divisions and the chaos of climate change. We are increasingly quite familiar to all kinds of social changes happening over the course of life time, and other things not changing at all, so it should not surprise anyone that, over a period of a little more than three decades since the Journal began, we can also list a range of incidents, which have left a bigger or small chronological footprint when we look back.

Yet, the fact that we have not yet succeeded in eradicating or even come close to remedying many of the world’s most pressing global challenges is increasingly seen by many as a sign of social scientists’ own failure to adequately do the right kind of social science research. Savage and Burrow’s ‘empirical crisis’ (Savage & Burrows, 2007) paper, for example, attempted to wake up the discipline of Sociology by pointing out that commercial enterprises, which increasingly own our individual level data, are in some ways better placed to empirically engage with the new kinds of data and methods needed to describe and explain social phenomena.

Similarly, Christakis (2013) provocation to both scientists and social scientists alike to ‘shake up the social sciences’ was a response to his view that ‘the social sciences have stagnated’ precisely because they have tackled problems such as racism in much the same way as they always have done and yet racism is still everywhere. As Wallerstein’s excellent essay, ‘The racist albatross’ (Wallerstein, 2000), warned us some years ago, the history of social science has in many ways been complicit in creating the very problems social scientists themselves are invested in addressing. Such discussions beg the long-standing questions of whether or not social scientists should be activists beyond academia as part of their research role, or undertake research that informs – or services policy-makers.

Leaving aside the question about whether or not or to what extent claims about the ‘crisis’, ‘stagnation’ or failure of social science are correct, the epistemological and methodological challenge of doing social research in a world that is itself constantly changing and not changing in new and some not so new ways remains. It is difficult to ignore challenges about how social research methodology can keep up with the social phenomena it is there to help us understand and explain, when the technological transformations that are now tracking us all the time and everywhere are making it harder and harder for social scientists to know who to study when, where and how.

The problem of being part of the social systems which we also want to study epitomizes the social researcher’s permanent empirical paradox: how can social research enable social phenomena to be adequately understood and explained whilst at the same time being constantly changed and disrupted by, and within, the very phenomena being examined? How are we to continue to try to understand the social as it, itself is constantly changing? What methods and methodologies both help and hinder our quest to understand the social in the making, in the past, present and future? What can we learn about the kind of social research methodology that has been discussed by authors across the world over time?

These are the kinds of questions which have fuelled this journal since it began and continue to do so today. Indeed, the Journal has maintained much the same focus since its inception, which is summed up nicely in the 1998 first issue:

… the Journal will focus on ongoing and emerging methodological issues and debates across a wide range of social science disciplines, substantive interests and the different organizational contexts and sectors in which social research and researchers are located. In this way the Journal will provide a forum for discussing the changing world of research, both internal and external changes, and their implications for the practice of research. We want the Journal to be relevant to researchers working from different approaches and to provide a resource for students pursuing courses in research methods. (Brannen & Edwards, 1998, p. 5)

Our current mission statement echoes that first statement very closely indeed, whereby we highlight that the purpose of the journal is:

•	a focus for on-going and emerging methodological debates across a range of approaches, both qualitative and quantitative, and including mixed and comparative methods, as these relate to philosophical, theoretical, ethical, political and practical issues;
•	an international medium for the publication of discussions of social research methodology and practices across a wide range of social science disciplines and substantive interests; and
•	a forum for researchers based in all sectors to consider and evaluate methods as these relate to research practice. (http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=tsrm20)

The Journal’s mission, therefore, has remained, almost word for word, as a forward-facing forum for researchers across the disciplines to critically engage with methodological issues and developments. Yet, as Varga (in press) sums up, ‘research methods and knowledge are co-evolving’. Therefore, reflecting on the historical contents of a methods-focused journal such as this also raises questions about the kinds of knowledges that have gone into shaping and reshaping methodological discussions over time. So what key observations can we pull out by looking at the contents of the journal across its 17 previous volumes?

So many methods!

A long-standing narrative within social research is that methods fall neatly into qualitative or quantitative approaches. What is encouraging to see in the journal over time is the ways in which that dominant narrative is steadily being challenged and sometimes simply ignored. This is not to say that the ‘quants/qual’ divide does not live on; it certainly does. Indeed, the majority of the papers we receive continue to focus on qualitative or quantitate approaches, or mixed methods approaches.

Importantly, though, within each of these broad categories, we have continued to see papers on many different kinds of methodological issues being discussed – so much so that, perhaps paradoxically, it is a wonder that these quantitative/qualitative/mixed methods categories manage to live on at all! In some ways, we might even take the liveliness of some debates to signal that these broad categories are as relevant as they ever were.

So, for example, we continue to see discussions about the importance of significance testing, surveys and probability sampling. Likewise, the hypothetico-deductive method and related experimental designs still have their adherents. That said, we note also more papers pointing to the growing crisis in significance testing, creating something of a methodological crisis in Psychology especially. Similarly, the general linear model which has fuelled so many quantitative techniques is still seen as a staple approach in most quantitative methods research papers. Though even within the methods based on the general linear model, advances in analysis software and techniques have led to important and sophisticated advances, particularly in multi-level modelling, longitudinal analysis and causal analysis.

Within qualitative research, ethnography, interviews and focus groups still win out with most qualitative papers using one or more combination of these approaches. Mixed methods continue to be a theme that has filled the pages over the journal existence, with many discussions highlighting both the benefits and the challenges of combining different methods. There are also more papers on longitudinal research – both qualitative and quantitative. This trend reflects the growing availability of longitudinal data in general, including more specialised cohort data, such as Britain’s internationally renowned cohort studies, which have led to a recent flurry of papers relating to a range of methodological challenges and opportunities (e.g. Lee, Roberts, Doyle, Anderson, & Carlin, 2016; Mustafa 2016; Brunton-Smith & Tarling, 2017; Sharland et al., 2017). In contrast, we have also begun to see more papers on case-based methods (e.g. QCA, cluster analysis) and a growing scholarship about cases and variables and the subsequent classifications that are made possible by both (e.g. Cooper & Glaesser, 2016; Fonseca, 2013; Williams & Gemperle, 2017).

Then there are methods that have emerged over the past 30 years but have not quite made it into this journal, although hopefully they will do in due course. Methods such as agent-based simulation for example, tend, to be located in journals such as Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS) and this journal has received and published little in this area. Discussions about evaluation methods and methodologies also seem to have veered off to other journals.

Moving forward, we welcome more submissions on networks, deep learning, natural experiments, simulation in general, as well as, of course, critical engagements with methods that describe or help to explain changes over time and/or space. Indeed, with the rise of more digitised social data with many more time and space points, it is likely that we will begin to see new methods that enable us to capture the ‘momentum’ of social trajectories, whereby the speed and direction of change is part and parcel of what is observed.

Recurring discussions …

These changes hide continuing preoccupations in discussions over time, which is to be expected given the mission statements of the journal have also remained more or less similar too. More precisely, when we look back over all the journal issues and the individual papers herein, we can detect three kinds of discussions that have reappeared through the pages of the journal, even if there are important differences in content at particular levels of observation.

The first sort of recurring paper concerns the kind of methods paper that reflects on a particular technological change in the world that makes doing social research a bit different, or sometimes, as the discussion suggests, maybe not that much differently. So, for example, in the early issues, we see papers about the methodological and epistemological implications of email interviews, whereas in more recent ones, we see discussions about using video, Skype, using social media and other kinds of digital social research approaches. The recent rise of big data has led to all kinds of methodological challenges that are already significantly impacting on what it means to do social research and how we do it and this is reflected in the increase of papers focused on methods for digital social research, web scraping and cloud computing.

This sort of paper, that is, the kind that critically engages with a particular kind of methodological approach that reflects the socio-technological innovation of its time, is arguably the largest group of ‘recurring papers’ over the close to two decades since the journal began. There is also the most diversity in this group, since the type of methodological issue itself is a changing one even if the tone of the discussion is less so.

The papers in this first group, as one might expect, mirror the timeline in which particular technologies emerge. From our perspective, it is reassuring that the journal functions as the kind of forum in which both readers and authors can reflect on the increased computerisation of method along with its epistemological implications of researching the social. Looking forward, we anticipate more discussions to do with the move towards open access to data that underpins the findings and arguments made in published papers. The same technological affordances that we noted earlier as shifting the parameters of methods, have also led to calls for transparency in data access for published material (see https://opennessinitiative.org). The push for online public availability of data so that published research can be evaluated is interesting for a journal concerned with methodology and methods, where the research process may be the evidence. It may not always be appropriate or possible to make ‘data’ underpinning methods discussions available, but nonetheless access to schedules, codings and programmes may be considered. This is a pressing and rather knotty issue that the journal editors, editorial board and journal publishers will be addressing – and hopefully have agreed, workable and established processes in place before the next 100 issues of IJSRM have appeared!

A second recurring kind of discussion, which is again a reassuring one from our point of view, is the focus on ethics. This is a broad area encompassing a whole range of ethical questions and dilemmas (e.g. Vermeylen & Clark, 2017), ranging from the role of ethics committees and ethical regulation (e.g. Monaghan, O’Dwyer, & Gabe, 2013), right through to issues which readers will no doubt be more familiar with, such as negotiating access to participants, issues of anonymisation (e.g. Moore, 2012; Wiles, Crow, Heath, & Charles, 2008) and informed consent (Aaltonen, 2017).

Within this recurring group of papers on ethical issues of some sort or the other, we also note the explicit engagement with issues of participation. Participation is defined a bit differently over time depending on the methodological medium of participation and of course who the participants in the discussion actually are. How the who changes in participatory methods is interesting in itself, with the changes telling a story of participation that moves between, say, the researcher and the researched. It is interesting to us that in spite of the increased automation involved in data collection and processes, there is still a steady recognition that ‘participatory’ methods and participation as a methodological concept in and of itself, matter and continue to matter.

That ethics and participation continue to matter does not mean that the actual issues remain constant, however. So for example, we have seen a number of research organisations revise their ethical guidelines to account for digital data, which may or may not be public. It is interesting, for example, that there is no agreed way of dealing with data which is public but is perhaps still not acceptable to use for further analysis. More issues around data linkage are becoming apparent, and indeed some of these were the topic of an event that IJSRM held on ‘Data linkage: ethical and social concerns’ in 2015. We are likely to see future papers on tensions between maximising data linkage for the benefit of knowing the social world better and better, and the ethical implications that are raised through increased data linkage.

The third group of recurring papers relates to the subject matter and disciplinary orientation of the material published. More precisely, the Journal has attracted academic researchers, and to a lesser extent practitioners, across the whole spectrum of social science fields of study. Thus, there are papers which locate themselves directly within the disciplinary areas of Health, Education, Psychology, for example. It is fair to say that there is a greater proportion of papers that are sociological inflected, with a focus on the issue of researching various social inequalities, such as religion, ethnicity, gender and class. We would like to attract more geographers into the journal, as well as anthropologists, and media and literary theorists and scholars. After all, method and methodology are increasingly becoming hot topics of discussion within those subject areas. Likewise, papers critically engaging with the methodological implications of interdisciplinarity would also be very welcome, and given that we have begun to see a few more papers referring to interdisciplinarity in the past couple of years suggests that this may well be another future area of methodological concern to come.

The Journal continues to be genuinely international in terms of both its readership and authorship, although we would like it to be ever more diverse still. The Journal has remained internationally sensitive and we are proud of the fact that so many parts of the world are represented. We are also delighted about the growing number of papers on methodology and methods from indigenous groups, which challenge and stimulate conventional assumptions. Again we would like to see more of such discussions, especially in relation to quantitative approaches.

All in all, there is no doubt that this is an exciting time for social research methods. The world is changing and so too are the methods used to understand it. Methods have always been areas of scholarship that researchers can engage with the social world in potentially emancipatory manner. Given the increased interdependence between data and method in the digital era, critically interrogating methods and methodologies are as urgent as it has ever been. For these reasons and more, we are confident about the need for the International Journal of Social Research Methodology as well as our capacity to continue to excel.

All that said, behind every successful journal there is a team of helpers that rarely get a mention. We would therefore like to thank the very great number of reviewers who have helped to shape the culture of the journal as much as the editors, editorial board, authors and readers themselves. We are aware of the ever growing demands on reviewers and we are especially grateful for their continued support in the Journal. We also recognise the work of the Journal’s wonderful Administrator, Alice Edwards, who has worked behind the scenes since 2006. As such, we dedicate this 100th issue to Alice Edwards as a mark of our sincere thanks for all the support, time and energy she has put into the journal over the years.

Emma Uprichard
Rosalind Edwards
[email protected] Williams