Engage@liverpool

Smoking remains a major problem among young people in Europe. However, within the research community examining the issue, debate continues about the best way of assessing the extent of that problem. Questions have been raised about the extent to which existing techniques for generating statistical representations of patterns of youth smoking can address a range of problems connected with identifying, accounting for and correcting unreliable self-report smoking data. Using empirical data from the UK Liverpool Longitudinal Smoking Study (LLSS), this paper argues that self-report measures of smoking, treated in isolation from participants’ personal accounts, can disguise problems with the reliability and validity of a given study. Using longitudinal qualitative and quantitative data in dialogue, two main factors contributing to unreliable data are discussed: (a) participants’ access to and familiarity with frameworks of everyday cultural knowledge about the practice of smoking, and (b) participants’ retrospective revision of events in line with their current goals, aspirations and self-understandings. The conclusion drawn is that research has to employ multiple methods, minimally incorporating some personal contribution from participants, to explore the complex character of the problem of smoking and to avoid the difficulties posed by the models of smoking behaviour embodied within stand-alone statistical research.

This report outlines findings from a series of pilot studies that aimed to assess the effectiveness of an innovative patient information delivery system called ‘mihealth’. It was conducted over a two-year period with breast cancer patients receiving treatment in Liverpool. The product of collaboration between a team of designers at the International Centre for Digital Content, Liverpool John Moores University, healthcare professionals in the Linda McCartney Breast Care Unit at the Royal Liverpool Hospital, patient support groups former patients and regional health networks, ‘mihealth’ combines generic and localised health, social and personal care information for those suffering from breast conditions.

Although the types of information gathered in the course of the study have varied, all the findings that we discuss in this report relate back to the question that provided the focus of the evaluation as a whole: did mihealth work for the patients it was designed to support?

The growing incidence of breast cancer in the UK, coupled with the Government’s insistence that ‘informed choice’ should be at the centre of the relationship between the patient and the healthcare system, has concentrated the minds of those responsible for delivering healthcare services to breast cancer sufferers – doctors, nurses, health service managers, civil servants and government officials alike – on the best ways of providing information. This is particularly clear in the case of breast cancer, where we find a patient body with a great deal to gain from access to a wide array of information resources (ABPI et al., 2005). At the same time, the rapid growth in the availability and familiarity of a range of health and non-health information and communication technologies (ICTs) has meant that demand for innovative ways of approaching the problem of delivering information to patients is growing and will continue to grow. In the context of the current Government’s “information revolution” (DOH, 2005a), we suggest that the lessons learned from implementing the mihealth evaluation go beyond immediate development issues relating to mihealth alone, to a wider public audience with a growing interest in the provision of health-related information in a digital age.

Underpinning this evaluation is a concern for what people actually do with information, and, as a consequence, what people actually need information to do for them. Taking the provision of information as a practical problem amenable to practical solutions means privileging the user's perspective. This, in turn, focus attention on information use as a real-world activity. In sharp contrast to the prescriptive and normative approach that characterises much work in the field – which concentrates on what information patients should or should not access, how they should or should not interpret that information and what they should or should not do with that information once they have it – an approach centred on the user-perspective abandons attempts to design systems that correct the ways in which patients routinely access, interpret and use information. Instead the task is to examine how we might take those routine patterns of use into account by allowing users to interact with any given system in an intuitive, user-friendly way that supports their information needs, as they themselves interpret them (Suchman 1987, Murphy et al., 1998). By exploring how those who participated in the evaluation integrated mihealth within the broad and varied arrays of information already available to them, and the strategies used to manage those arrays, we have hopefully been able to explore how users made information relevant to them in this particular context.

In recent years, tobacco research, as a field of investigative practices, has come to be seen as a major contributor to broader tobacco control efforts and a ‘significant component of the global health agenda’ (World Health Organization (1999). Confronting the epidemic: A Global Agenda For Tobacco Control Research. Geneva: WHO, p. 14; Warner, K. E. (2005). The role of research in international tobacco control. American Journal of Public Health, 95(6), 976–984). However, despite some discussion about the research-specific implications of, for instance, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) (World Health Organisation (2003a) (ratified 2005). The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Geneva: WHO, Articles 20–22), questions remain about what the exact nature of the relationship between tobacco research and tobacco control should be. Guided by that central question, this article draws attention to recent attempts to define this relationship, in particular that embodied in the Global Tobacco Research Network (GTRN), in order to facilitate debate on how such definitions attempt to shape the research agenda. Throughout, the main critical focus will be the attempt to generate characterizations of the field, through entities like the GTRN, which relate tobacco-related research practices vis-à-vis their relationship to tobacco control. It is argued that such characterizations present a distorted and oversimplified picture of how we might assess the empirical work we find across the field as a whole. Tracing these difficulties back to the narrow normative position embodied within the GTRN and World Health Organization approach to tobacco research, the article concludes by arguing that there is a need to recognize, rather than correct for, the overlapping and diverse bodies of work which the study of tobacco-related questions has helped establish.

This article examines some general issues around the use of data in social research by taking an extended look at how drawings and text have been used in ‘draw and write’ research. With reference to a split between positivist and interpretivist studies, the authors argue that the problems generated by draw and write research reflect what has been described as a ‘crisis of representation’ in social research more broadly. With reference to descriptive material collected for a study of smoking initiation among young people in Liverpool, England, they argue that researchers must rethink the uses to which data, particularly descriptive data, are put within orthodox social research. The modified version of the ‘draw and write technique’ outlined in the article represents the authors' attempt to achieve that re‐orientation.

In this article, I examine a defining feature of the ‘new public health’: the (re)construction of health-related phenomena in behavioural terms. While the ‘behavioural turn’ within epidemiology has had far-reaching implications for the way in which public health problems as a whole are conceptualised, including, significantly, obesity and alcohol (mis)use, here I explore how the new public health works up its behavioural objects using the example of tobacco use. Beginning with the work of counting smokers, I trace the emergence and consolidation of a standard model for identifying and measuring tobacco-related harm, a model, I argue, that has been extended so that tobacco use itself can be treated in disease terms. As I show with reference to an example of contemporary public health research practice in the UK, this extension is problematic because it establishes a depoliticised view of the public's health that concentrates on individuals, recast as bundles of problem behaviours, at the expense of any examination of the social, cultural and economic circumstances in which those individuals live. Epidemiological research of this kind, with its core message that behavioural problems require behavioural solutions, relies on close alliances between the health sector and decision-makers more broadly. Under these conditions, the point at which research ends and government begins is often difficult to locate. I conclude by arguing that we should pay greater attention to the epidemiological practices used to transform the behaviour of the tobacco user, like that of the eater or drinker, into a site of governmental intervention.

In this article we argue that research into information for patients has to extend beyond an evaluation of particular information resources to studies of how those resources are engaged with, made sense of and used in practice. We draw on empirical data collected in the course of a study of a patient information resource designed for breast cancer patients in Liverpool and Newcastle in order to demonstrate the limitations of a restricted focus on information resources alone – namely, that it does not take into account the specific ways in which information is incorporated within what patients do as the grounds of ‘further inference and action’. Our interest is less in discussing the strengths and weaknesses of this particular resource than in explicating some neglected aspects of the commonplace ways in which patients ‘work’ with information. We conclude by sketching some broad features of those ‘reading’ and ‘linking’ practices, the study of which, we believe, would help us as researchers to explicate the ‘problem of information’ as it is actually encountered and resolved by patients in realworld settings for their own practical purposes. Taking our lead from ethnomethodological studies and related research in various fields, we argue patients’ uses of information are social practices that can and should be treated as researchable phenomena.

Despite the huge literature on the methodology of the social sciences, relatively little interest has been shown in sociological description of social science research methods in practice, i.e., in the application of sociology to sociological work. The overwhelming (if not exhaustive) interest in research methods is an evaluative and prescriptive one. This is particularly surprising, since the sociology of science has in the past few decades scrutinised almost every aspect of natural science methodology. Ethnographic and historical case studies have moved from an analysis of the products of science to investigations of the processes of scientific work in the laboratory. Social scientists appear to have been rather reluctant to explore this aspect of their own work in any great depth.

In this paper, we report on a "methodography", an empirical study of research methods in practice. This took the form of a small-scale investigation of the working practices of two groups of social scientists, one with a predominantly qualitative approach, the other involved in statistical modelling. The main part of the paper involves a comparison between two brief episodes taken from the work of each, one focussing on how two researchers analyse and draw conclusions from an interview transcript, the other on how collaborators work out an agreed final version of a statistical model for combining temporal and spatial data. Based on our analysis of these examples, we raise some questions about the way in which social scientists reason through their problems, and the role that characterisations of research, as research of a particular kind (e.g., qualitative or quantitative), play in actual research practice.

This panel explores the ways actors conceive of, address and so topicalize the issue of knowledge – the known and the knowable/what is or can be known and how – as part of the work of practical inquiry. In what ways can knowledge be established? What techniques are utilized to demonstrate knowledge? By what methods are claims to knowledge secured in the face of challenges and opposing claims?

The session will explore how those engaged in situations of practical inquiry support their claims to know in light of critiques of their ‘knowledge’. In and across all manner of sites, settings and fields, those who lay claim to know things, as practical inquirers, are increasingly required to stipulate the conditions under which what is claimed to be known can be said to be properly known. Examples include but are by no means limited to:

The articulation of expertise on particular issues including such things as climate science and climate change, parenting and the family or the nature of social, political and economic crises;

The practical demonstrations of criminality and crime rates;

The plausibility of accounts of truth or falsity in inquiries of courts or governments;

The existence of deities in conjunction with or opposition to scientific inquiry;

Behaviorist, cognitivist and genetic causal explanations of human activity and social relationships;

The certainty of public officials’ birthplaces; etc.

Repeatedly, what is said to be known is questioned by way of variously leveraged challenges to the very notion of certainty, challenges directed at the status of the claimed objects of knowledge as well as the techniques used to arrive at knowledge of them. That is, they are challenged by way of counter claims which suggest that what is said to be known cannot be known or known in that way. With reference to empirical examples of practical inquiry, the panel will examine the methodical practices that make claims to knowledge account-able in ordinary situations. Particular attention will be given to such things as formulations, counter formulations, rebuttals and downgrading as ‘settinged’ interactional and/or textual accomplishments, as well as to various ‘object involving’ practices including, for example, the way in which claims and counter-claims come to be anchored in and elaborated with reference to visuals displays and arrangements of material/technical artifacts. Of interest are the varied ways in which such practices provide grounds for the (re)assessment of courses, techniques and programmes of action and reasoning, not just in terms of the specific technical notions of adequacy, bias, commitment, etc, that may be in play but also, for example, in terms of the moral, ethical and political positions that become attributable to the parties involved in and through their use.

The social sciences are currently going through a reflexive phase, one marked by the appearance of a wave of studies which approach their disciplines’ own methods and research practices as their empirical subject matter. Driven partly by a growing interest in knowledge production and partly by a desire to make the social sciences ‘fit-for-purpose’ in the digital era, these studies seek to reinvigorate debates around methods by treating them as embedded social and cultural phenomena with their own distinctive biographical trajectories – or “social lives”. Empirical studies of social scientific work and the role of methods within it, however, remain relatively scarce. This paper draws together a literature scattered across various social science disciplines and their sub-fields in which social science methods have been studied empirically. It is available open-access via the NCRM website.

As a contribution to current debates on the ‘social life of methods’, in this article we present an ethnomethodological study of the role of understanding within statistical practice. After reviewing the empirical turn in the methods literature and the challenges to the qualitative-quantitative divide it has given rise to, we argue such case studies are relevant because they enable us to see different ways in which ‘methods’, here quantitative methods, come to have a social life – by embodying and exhibiting understanding they ‘make the social structures of everyday activities observable’ (Garfinkel, 1967: 75), thereby putting society on display. Exhibited understandings rest on distinctive lines of practical social and cultural inquiry – ethnographic ‘forays’ into the worlds of the producers and users of statistics – which are central to good statistical work but are not themselves quantitative. In highlighting these non-statistical forms of social and cultural inquiry at work in statistical practice, our case study is an addition to understandings of statistics and usefully points to ways in which studies of the social life of methods might be further developed from here.

In this chapter we trace some of the ways in which the United Kingdom’s private finance initiative (PFI) – a species of ‘public private partnership’ (PPP) whose operations and effects we explore in what follows – can be treated as an example of ‘corruption’. Through an examination of associations between practice, process and context in the implementation of PFI, we focus on the role of the state and new forms of governmental arrangement in establishing contexts in which corruption, understood in different ways, can flourish.

The social sciences have been gripped by many ‘turns’ over the last 30 years: the interpretive turn, the linguistic turn, the practice turn, the ontological turn, the epistemic turn, and many more. The ‘turn’ to matter, materiality and the material – or ‘materialities’ (Law 2004) – is just one of the more recent. While ethnomethodology has long been interested in the material and embodied character of social action and interaction, it is also important to clarify the praxiological bases on which that interest rests. Rather than treat materialities as a source of analytically privileged insight, this panel will seek to do that by asking where, when and for what practical purposes members themselves ‘turn to the material’ (Garfinkel 1967, 2002), thereby making ‘matter matter’ in particular ways (Barad 2007, Lynch 2013, 2014).

The panel presents a series of ethnomethodological studies which examine how material orders acquire practical significance, in a range of settings – from everyday situations through to, for instance, sites of legal, political, organisational and scientific activity. In addition to exploring the occasioned ways in which claims about material orders are presented, established and/or disputed in those settings and for what ends, the papers also examine how references to ‘the material’ become meaningful via locally occasioned contrasts with, for example, the virtual, the immaterial, the unreal, and more. Having explored these issues, the panel concludes with a discussion of how ethnomethodological orientations to the phenomenon of materiality can advance social scientific understandings of the place of the material in social practice.

In this chapter we examine supermarket growth in the UK. This phenomenon provides a particularly useful case, we argue, because developing an understanding of what has given it shape and direction underscores the point made in different ways by all contributors to this volume, namely that economic activities do not stand alone but are, simultaneously and significantly, social, cultural, political, governmental and, crucially, moral in character – something the concept of moral economy is designed to bring to the fore (e.g. Sayer 2000, 2007). If that concept is to have any analytical purchase, however, the practices – of justification, of representation, of judgement, of valuation, of organisation, of distribution and exchange, and so on – of which moral economies are composed have to be linked to a material ground, to the wider forms of social, cultural and political life which they are intertwined with and help sustain (Tully 2008). This cannot be a matter of opposing one set of generalised and totalising claims (on, for example, the moral virtues or vices of competition) with another. Rather, it is a matter of treating those claims as themselves embedded features of complex contemporary social, economic and governmental landscapes. The question we want to pose in what follows is, therefore, where, when and in relation to what do moral economies acquire their concrete form?

If we want to explore the material grounds of contemporary moral economies, however, we will have to grapple with the fact that their elaboration takes place across many different sites and settings and in many different ways – the practices in question are highly localised/localising, fragmented and heterogeneous, both here-and-now and over time. Capturing this requires a genealogical approach, enabling us to identify the multiple points of origin out of which contemporary moral economic formations have arisen as part of a ‘history of the present’ (Foucault 1977, Tully 2008). We will use the example of supermarkets in order to make this methodological case, focusing specifically on how the growth of supermarket chains has fed into and fed off a remodelling of the built environment, the labour market and the tax and benefit system in the UK.