About Realities
Aims
Realities aims to develop methods and approaches that capture the combination of vital, tangible and intangible dynamics in the way that personal relationships and relationalities are lived. Methodological creativity is central to our work, but we also value and draw on long-established methodological traditions. We describe our approach as "qualitatively-driven" - it starts from what we see as some of the best principles of qualitative research, but moves beyond these to engage both qualitatively and quantitatively with the complex realities of everyday lives.
We have two research projects where we put our ideas into practice by developing and extending methodologies for understanding the dynamics of relationships and personal lives. Our projects are:
- Inter/generational Dynamics - combining qualitative and quantitative approaches to study intergenerational relationships from the point of view of older people
- Critical Associations - using new and traditional methodological approaches to explore the positive and negative aspects of personal relationships between friends, foes, colleagues and acquaintances.
Our training and capacity building activities include our Methods in Dialogue workshops and one day Training Workshops, and we will have an international conference - Vital Signs 2 - in September 2010. See our events calendar for forthcoming events.
We also produce web-based resources, such as our working papers and toolkits.
Finally, in our 'interdisciplinary dialogue' events, we invite researchers working at the cutting edge of methodological developments into advanced level 'boundary-pushing' dialogue and debate.
Video of Jennifer Mason talking about our research and training programme
Our organisation and funding
Realities is part of the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM), which is funded by the ESRC. The centre aims to improve research methods skills in the social research in the UK.
Different parts of NCRM focus on developing knowledge and skills in different areas of social science research methods.
Realities is based at the Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Life at the University of Manchester.
Background
Realities grows from and extends the work of the Real Life Methods programme of work. Real Life Methods, also part of the National Centre for Research Methods and funded by ESRC, started on 1 October 2005 and the work is now coming to an end during autumn 2008. Real Life Methods is based at the University of Manchester and the University of Leeds.
Real Life Methods worked on a similar format to Realities, with a programme of training events and four research projects each designed to test a range of different methodological approaches.