Emma Uprichard
Biographic Data
| ID | 304850 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Emma Uprichard |
| GIVEN NAMES | Emma |
| FAMILY NAME | Uprichard |
| SIGNATURE | UPRICHARD E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Warwick |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6515-0219 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 133 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 25 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2018 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary Research Methods
Changing girlhoods - Changing Girl Guiding
This article discusses the changing nature of girlhood over the last century as it is depicted through an empirical study of all editions of Girl Guide handbooks since 1910. The article describes three strands of change, which we describe as 'stringy', insofar as they are co-occur together and are difficult to untangle from one another; yet they are also stories of change that are nevertheless visible as strands in and of themselves through the e…
Data
The word “data” originates from Latin, but its meaning has been evolving ever since. Indeed, what data are and come to be and how they are used all change according to how society itself changes. Social data are never neutral and increasingly, in an age of “big data,” they are also a highly commercialized commodity.
Complexity
Complexity has been applied across the social sciences and in many fields of sociology. To assume the social world is complex is an ontological statement about how the world is and the kinds of patterns of change and continuity that we might expect to observe at a general level. Nonlinearity is one among many features that complex systems share and it is also one of the key reasons why a growing number of authors argue that a radical shift in the…
IJSRM’s 100th issue
Data Diffraction
This article extends the debates relating to integration in mixed methods research. We challenge the a priori assumptions on which integration is assumed to be possible in the first place. More specifically, following Haraway and Barad, we argue that methods produce "cuts" which may or may not cohere and that "diffraction," as an expanded approach to integration, has much to offer mixed methods research. Diffraction pays attention to the ways in …
Classification
Classification and classification systems organize everyday life and do so in ways that are increasingly automated. Classifiers classify the classifiable and are highly political. Yet, ironically, it is precisely through devising new forms of classification that social scientists can also intervene and develop new modes of resistance in everyday life
Reply to Smith and Atkinson
Smith and Atkinson have written a useful reflection of Aaron Cicourel’s Method and Measurement (MM it will tell you something new and remind you of other aspects about which you may have forgotten. Their account of M&M is, I think, especially helpful for three main reasons. First, it offers an excellent synthesis of the book’s main arguments. Second, it brings out the some of the relevance of why Cicourel’s work is relevant today – more about thi…
The Materiality of Method
The Mass Observation Archive presents numerous methodological issues for social researchers. The data are idiosyncratic, difficult to analyze, and the sample design is nonsystematic. Such issues seriously challenge conventional social research protocols. This article highlights a further characteristic of the archive: its unwieldy materiality. Focusing on the sensory experiences of the archive and its particular type of data, the article shows ho…
Food hates’ over the life course
This article presents data from the UK Mass Observation Archive drawn from the 1982 Winter Food Directive, which focuses on memories of childhood food 'hates'. Through our analysis of these data, we identify three main findings: (a) there is a discrepancy between individual-level and collective aggregate level food hates, which problematises the notion of commensality; (b) a small but powerful 'outlier' group of respondents, which we refer to as …
Describing Description (and Keeping Causality)
Recently, Savage and Burrows argued that there is an 'empirical crisis' in sociology. They concluded that sociologists should abandon a focus on causality for descriptions that 'link narrative, numbers, and images'. This article takes up their challenge by using Wordle to depict the changing focus in academic articles on food and eating since 1950. Using this illustrative example, it is argued that their call to abandon causality is problematic f…
Being Stuck in (Live) Time
Recently, Savage and Burrows (2007) have argued that one way to invigorate sociology's 'empirical crisis' is to take advantage of live, web-based digital transactional data. This paper argues that whilst sociologists do indeed need to engage with this growing digital data deluge, there are longer-term risks involved that need to be considered. More precisely, C. Wright Mills' 'sociological imagination' is used as the basis for the kind of sociolo…
Sampling
This article reconceptualizes sampling in social research. It is argued that three inter-related a priori assumptions limit on the possibility of sample design, namely: (a) the ontology of the case, (b) the epistemological assumptions underpinning what properties are necessary to know the case and (c) the logistics involved in the process of 'casing' the case. In considering sampling in this way, not only are key criteria commonly used to gauge t…
Dirty Data
Typically in longitudinal quantitative research, classifications are tracked over time. However, most classifications change in absolute terms in that some die whilst others are created, and in their meaning. There is a need, therefore, to re-think how longitudinal quantitative research might explore both the qualitative changes to classification systems as well as the quantitative changes within each classification. By drawing on the changing cl…
A Slice of Life
This paper reports on an analysis of hitherto unexamined documentary data on food held within the UK Mass Observation Archive (MOA). In particular it discusses responses to the 1982 Winter Directive which asked MOA correspondents about their experiences of food and eating, and the food diaries submitted by MOA panel members in 1945. What is striking about these data is the extent to which memories of food and eating are interwoven with recollecti…
Questioning Research with Children
This paper argues that current child and childhood research is problematical in as much as there is a discrepancy between theory and research practice. Although in theory, children are conceptualised as active agents in the social world, the type of research that children are typically involved in implies that children are competent, knowledgeable and affective only in terms of their own lives, their own spaces, their own childhoods. The implicat…
Geodemographic Code and the Production of Space
There is a growing body of research relating to the ways in which digital code contributes to the production of space. In much of this work this issue is approached by first examining particular spaces and then considering the code and its effects on those spaces. In contrast, we explore the production of space from another angle, examining the ways in which an example of code-geodemographic classification-is constructed, and then questioning wha…
Children as ‘Being and Becomings’
Notions of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ are intrinsic to childhood research. Whilst the ‘being’ child is seen as a social actor actively constructing ‘childhood’, the ‘becoming’ child is seen as an ‘adult in the making’, lacking competencies of the ‘adult’ that he or she will ‘become’. However, I argue that both approaches are in themselves problematic. Instead, theorising children as ‘being and becomings’ not only addresses the temporality of childhoo…
SPSS as an 'Inscription Device
This paper examines the development of SPSS from 1968 to 2008, and the manner in which it has been used in teaching and research in British Sociology. We do this in order to reveal some of the changes that have taken place in statistical reasoning as an inscription device in the discipline over this period. We conclude that to characterise these changes as a shift from 'causal' to more 'descriptive' modes of analysis is too simplistic. Such a shi…
Class Places and Place Classes Geodemographics and the Spatialization of Class
This paper argues that the 'spatial turn' in the sociology of class - the clustering of people with a similar habitus into what we might think of as 'class places' - is connected in a number of important ways with the ongoing informatization of place, particularly as manifest in the urban informatics technology of geodemographics. This is a technology concerned with the development of the classification of places to commercial and policy ends - t…
Crossing Levels
This article demonstrates how we might explore trajectories of complex systems through time when we are dealing with multiple levels of systems with intersecting causal propensities. Using ‘social exclusion’ as an illustrative example, the objective is to develop a methodological approach, using available secondary data sources, that transcends the linear and uni-directional faults of conventional multi-level modelling. This alternative approach …
Representing Complex Places
The authors argue that narratives-the plural being very important-are crucial for the representation of complex urban spaces. They do this by drawing on first-hand empirical examples from a previous examination of people's understanding of 'postindustrial transformation' from the past through the present to the future, and earlier work on children's understanding of their own places in the present and the future. In so doing, they propose that th…
Using Diaries for Social Reseach (Introducing Qualitative Methods Series)
Method, Methodology and Pedagogy in Social Research
Joint Review
Data Diffraction
This article extends the debates relating to integration in mixed methods research. We challenge the a priori assumptions on which integration is assumed to be possible in the first place. More specifically, following Haraway and Barad, we argue that methods produce "cuts" which may or may not cohere and that "diffraction," as an expanded approach to integration, has much to offer mixed methods research. Diffraction pays attention to the ways in …
SPSS as an 'Inscription Device
This paper examines the development of SPSS from 1968 to 2008, and the manner in which it has been used in teaching and research in British Sociology. We do this in order to reveal some of the changes that have taken place in statistical reasoning as an inscription device in the discipline over this period. We conclude that to characterise these changes as a shift from 'causal' to more 'descriptive' modes of analysis is too simplistic. Such a shi…
Being Stuck in (Live) Time
Recently, Savage and Burrows (2007) have argued that one way to invigorate sociology's 'empirical crisis' is to take advantage of live, web-based digital transactional data. This paper argues that whilst sociologists do indeed need to engage with this growing digital data deluge, there are longer-term risks involved that need to be considered. More precisely, C. Wright Mills' 'sociological imagination' is used as the basis for the kind of sociolo…
A Slice of Life
This paper reports on an analysis of hitherto unexamined documentary data on food held within the UK Mass Observation Archive (MOA). In particular it discusses responses to the 1982 Winter Directive which asked MOA correspondents about their experiences of food and eating, and the food diaries submitted by MOA panel members in 1945. What is striking about these data is the extent to which memories of food and eating are interwoven with recollecti…
Sampling
This article reconceptualizes sampling in social research. It is argued that three inter-related a priori assumptions limit on the possibility of sample design, namely: (a) the ontology of the case, (b) the epistemological assumptions underpinning what properties are necessary to know the case and (c) the logistics involved in the process of 'casing' the case. In considering sampling in this way, not only are key criteria commonly used to gauge t…
Geodemographic Code and the Production of Space
There is a growing body of research relating to the ways in which digital code contributes to the production of space. In much of this work this issue is approached by first examining particular spaces and then considering the code and its effects on those spaces. In contrast, we explore the production of space from another angle, examining the ways in which an example of code-geodemographic classification-is constructed, and then questioning wha…
Food hates’ over the life course
This article presents data from the UK Mass Observation Archive drawn from the 1982 Winter Food Directive, which focuses on memories of childhood food 'hates'. Through our analysis of these data, we identify three main findings: (a) there is a discrepancy between individual-level and collective aggregate level food hates, which problematises the notion of commensality; (b) a small but powerful 'outlier' group of respondents, which we refer to as …
Representing Complex Places
The authors argue that narratives-the plural being very important-are crucial for the representation of complex urban spaces. They do this by drawing on first-hand empirical examples from a previous examination of people's understanding of 'postindustrial transformation' from the past through the present to the future, and earlier work on children's understanding of their own places in the present and the future. In so doing, they propose that th…
Describing Description (and Keeping Causality)
Recently, Savage and Burrows argued that there is an 'empirical crisis' in sociology. They concluded that sociologists should abandon a focus on causality for descriptions that 'link narrative, numbers, and images'. This article takes up their challenge by using Wordle to depict the changing focus in academic articles on food and eating since 1950. Using this illustrative example, it is argued that their call to abandon causality is problematic f…
Dirty Data
Typically in longitudinal quantitative research, classifications are tracked over time. However, most classifications change in absolute terms in that some die whilst others are created, and in their meaning. There is a need, therefore, to re-think how longitudinal quantitative research might explore both the qualitative changes to classification systems as well as the quantitative changes within each classification. By drawing on the changing cl…
The Materiality of Method
The Mass Observation Archive presents numerous methodological issues for social researchers. The data are idiosyncratic, difficult to analyze, and the sample design is nonsystematic. Such issues seriously challenge conventional social research protocols. This article highlights a further characteristic of the archive: its unwieldy materiality. Focusing on the sensory experiences of the archive and its particular type of data, the article shows ho…
IJSRM’s 100th issue
Class, Space and Community
Class, Space and Community: A Workshop Conference was organized by the Sociology and Social Policy Department at the University of Durham on April 6–8th, 2001. Academics from a variety of disciplines were brought together to explore the social and cultural implications of deindustrialization on people and communities whose identities were once founded on industrialism and manufacturing. From the detailed accounts about individual lives, communiti…
Joint Review
Representing Complex Places
The authors argue that narratives-the plural being very important-are crucial for the representation of complex urban spaces. They do this by drawing on first-hand empirical examples from a previous examination of people's understanding of 'postindustrial transformation' from the past through the present to the future, and earlier work on children's understanding of their own places in the present and the future. In so doing, they propose that th…
Using Diaries for Social Reseach (Introducing Qualitative Methods Series)
Method, Methodology and Pedagogy in Social Research
Class Places and Place Classes Geodemographics and the Spatialization of Class
This paper argues that the 'spatial turn' in the sociology of class - the clustering of people with a similar habitus into what we might think of as 'class places' - is connected in a number of important ways with the ongoing informatization of place, particularly as manifest in the urban informatics technology of geodemographics. This is a technology concerned with the development of the classification of places to commercial and policy ends - t…
Crossing Levels
This article demonstrates how we might explore trajectories of complex systems through time when we are dealing with multiple levels of systems with intersecting causal propensities. Using ‘social exclusion’ as an illustrative example, the objective is to develop a methodological approach, using available secondary data sources, that transcends the linear and uni-directional faults of conventional multi-level modelling. This alternative approach …
Children as ‘Being and Becomings’
Notions of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ are intrinsic to childhood research. Whilst the ‘being’ child is seen as a social actor actively constructing ‘childhood’, the ‘becoming’ child is seen as an ‘adult in the making’, lacking competencies of the ‘adult’ that he or she will ‘become’. However, I argue that both approaches are in themselves problematic. Instead, theorising children as ‘being and becomings’ not only addresses the temporality of childhoo…
SPSS as an 'Inscription Device
This paper examines the development of SPSS from 1968 to 2008, and the manner in which it has been used in teaching and research in British Sociology. We do this in order to reveal some of the changes that have taken place in statistical reasoning as an inscription device in the discipline over this period. We conclude that to characterise these changes as a shift from 'causal' to more 'descriptive' modes of analysis is too simplistic. Such a shi…
Geodemographic Code and the Production of Space
There is a growing body of research relating to the ways in which digital code contributes to the production of space. In much of this work this issue is approached by first examining particular spaces and then considering the code and its effects on those spaces. In contrast, we explore the production of space from another angle, examining the ways in which an example of code-geodemographic classification-is constructed, and then questioning wha…
Questioning Research with Children
This paper argues that current child and childhood research is problematical in as much as there is a discrepancy between theory and research practice. Although in theory, children are conceptualised as active agents in the social world, the type of research that children are typically involved in implies that children are competent, knowledgeable and affective only in terms of their own lives, their own spaces, their own childhoods. The implicat…
Sampling
This article reconceptualizes sampling in social research. It is argued that three inter-related a priori assumptions limit on the possibility of sample design, namely: (a) the ontology of the case, (b) the epistemological assumptions underpinning what properties are necessary to know the case and (c) the logistics involved in the process of 'casing' the case. In considering sampling in this way, not only are key criteria commonly used to gauge t…
Dirty Data
Typically in longitudinal quantitative research, classifications are tracked over time. However, most classifications change in absolute terms in that some die whilst others are created, and in their meaning. There is a need, therefore, to re-think how longitudinal quantitative research might explore both the qualitative changes to classification systems as well as the quantitative changes within each classification. By drawing on the changing cl…
A Slice of Life
This paper reports on an analysis of hitherto unexamined documentary data on food held within the UK Mass Observation Archive (MOA). In particular it discusses responses to the 1982 Winter Directive which asked MOA correspondents about their experiences of food and eating, and the food diaries submitted by MOA panel members in 1945. What is striking about these data is the extent to which memories of food and eating are interwoven with recollecti…
Being Stuck in (Live) Time
Recently, Savage and Burrows (2007) have argued that one way to invigorate sociology's 'empirical crisis' is to take advantage of live, web-based digital transactional data. This paper argues that whilst sociologists do indeed need to engage with this growing digital data deluge, there are longer-term risks involved that need to be considered. More precisely, C. Wright Mills' 'sociological imagination' is used as the basis for the kind of sociolo…
Food hates’ over the life course
This article presents data from the UK Mass Observation Archive drawn from the 1982 Winter Food Directive, which focuses on memories of childhood food 'hates'. Through our analysis of these data, we identify three main findings: (a) there is a discrepancy between individual-level and collective aggregate level food hates, which problematises the notion of commensality; (b) a small but powerful 'outlier' group of respondents, which we refer to as …
Describing Description (and Keeping Causality)
Recently, Savage and Burrows argued that there is an 'empirical crisis' in sociology. They concluded that sociologists should abandon a focus on causality for descriptions that 'link narrative, numbers, and images'. This article takes up their challenge by using Wordle to depict the changing focus in academic articles on food and eating since 1950. Using this illustrative example, it is argued that their call to abandon causality is problematic f…
The Materiality of Method
The Mass Observation Archive presents numerous methodological issues for social researchers. The data are idiosyncratic, difficult to analyze, and the sample design is nonsystematic. Such issues seriously challenge conventional social research protocols. This article highlights a further characteristic of the archive: its unwieldy materiality. Focusing on the sensory experiences of the archive and its particular type of data, the article shows ho…
Reply to Smith and Atkinson
Smith and Atkinson have written a useful reflection of Aaron Cicourel’s Method and Measurement (MM it will tell you something new and remind you of other aspects about which you may have forgotten. Their account of M&M is, I think, especially helpful for three main reasons. First, it offers an excellent synthesis of the book’s main arguments. Second, it brings out the some of the relevance of why Cicourel’s work is relevant today – more about thi…
Data Diffraction
This article extends the debates relating to integration in mixed methods research. We challenge the a priori assumptions on which integration is assumed to be possible in the first place. More specifically, following Haraway and Barad, we argue that methods produce "cuts" which may or may not cohere and that "diffraction," as an expanded approach to integration, has much to offer mixed methods research. Diffraction pays attention to the ways in …
Classification
Classification and classification systems organize everyday life and do so in ways that are increasingly automated. Classifiers classify the classifiable and are highly political. Yet, ironically, it is precisely through devising new forms of classification that social scientists can also intervene and develop new modes of resistance in everyday life
Data
The word “data” originates from Latin, but its meaning has been evolving ever since. Indeed, what data are and come to be and how they are used all change according to how society itself changes. Social data are never neutral and increasingly, in an age of “big data,” they are also a highly commercialized commodity.
Complexity
Complexity has been applied across the social sciences and in many fields of sociology. To assume the social world is complex is an ontological statement about how the world is and the kinds of patterns of change and continuity that we might expect to observe at a general level. Nonlinearity is one among many features that complex systems share and it is also one of the key reasons why a growing number of authors argue that a radical shift in the…
IJSRM’s 100th issue
Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary Research Methods
Sociology (22 works) · Epistemology (16 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Social science (11 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice (5 works) · Data Analysis and Archiving (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics (5 works)