Life interviews can take many forms. Their purpose is to provide a biography of a person's life or, more commonly, a part of a person's life. This chapter focuses on two forms of life interview, McAdams' life story interview and the narrative life interview. McAdams' approach is to consider the whole of life, split into chapters, and examining key elements such as important memories, events, stressors and the person's world view. McAdams explores key issues such as redemption and contamination. The narrative life interview is designed to focus on specific key transitions in a person's life and to explore the impact of these transitions on people's behaviour, thoughts and feelings. Examples are provided.

This chapter introduces micro-sociological methodologies and analytical strategies, including the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of micro-sociology. The chapter proposes three micro-sociological strategies: studying key events, interaction ritual chains, and patterned phenomena. The chapter shows how micro-sociological analysis can be conducted with various methods but focuses mainly on video data analysis (VDA), because this method is particularly well-suited for capturing micro-dynamics of rhythm, emotions, and bodily interaction. The chapter shows how to gather, code, and analyze video material and illustrates how VDA can be triangulated with other methods. Likewise, the chapter presents positivist and post-positivist epistemologies of VDA. The chapter further discusses dilemmas of VDA related to (1) access and availability, (2) validity and veracity, (3) data presentation, and (4) ethics. Finally, the chapter presents the data sources, methods, and methodological considerations that make up the empirical basis of the book.

This chapter introduces the central research agenda, methodology, and scope of the book, centring the concept of grievance formation. Discussing the legal foundations and modalities of remedies in international law, the chapter poses the question of state remedial responsibilities in relation to the passage of time. This is a central question in the globally emerging discussions on whether states ought to remedy sterilisation or castration practices in their past. Furthermore, the chapter lays down the theoretical framework for the book’s use of the concept of grievance formation. As employed in social movement theory, this concept describes the process of people starting to address harmful experiences as common grievances. In this chapter, the concept is initially introduced into legal research by linking it with rights mobilisation: how victims of rights violations redefine traumatic experiences as individual or common grievances, rights violations, and legal harm to be remedied. As such, the concept offers a theoretical framework to understand how and why some victims of rights violations begin to conceptualise themselves as such and demand state responsibility, while others might not; why victims are publicly and institutionally recognised and redressed to different extents.

As a contested concept, “youth” is a chronological category and a socially constructed identity. African youth share socioeconomic and political constraints that delay adulthood markers and impact their views of citizenship. The meaning of “youth” is relational, set against assumptions about adulthood obligations, ties to elders, and youth’s own actions. Although youth is a liminal stage, youth are not passive; they improvise and engage their communities and countries through everyday citizenship. Recognizing how political life is abundant, everyday citizenship as a concept examines daily words and deeds of ordinary people who then shape identity and belonging in relation to others and the state. As a guiding principle distinguishable from nationalism (with its geographic component), civil society (with its organizational element), and social capital (with its roots in reciprocities), everyday citizenship pushes beyond rigid liberal and communal classifications to recognize how citizen identities and activities occur at multiple scales and sites, and through public and private practices. We examine various patterns of everyday citizenship in Ghana, Tanzania, and Uganda – countries representative of anglophone Africa but distinct in their regime types. The book’s multi-method, inductive approach uses Afrobarometer survey data, focus group discussions, interviews, and case studies to undergird its findings.

This chapter provides an explanation for the different approaches to local government taken by populist radical right parties in Austria, France, Italy and Switzerland, and their different degree of radicalism. It conducts a systematic exploration of the process by which these parties govern at the local level. The empirical basis for this analysis is interviews with 57 local government actors, semi-structured in order to investigate the two overarching themes that are theoretically expected to influence their approaches to governing. The chapter unveils the mechanisms through which moderation is imposed (or radicalism is facilitated) by, first, various institutional constraints, and, second, cross-level party linkages. As a final step, it reconstructs the process by which each populist radical right-led local government responded to the European migration crisis during the 2010s. The institutional constraints and cross-level party linkages particular to each of the four cases can explain the varied (multi-level) governance configurations that emerge, and as a result the varying degree of radicalism in their approach.

The social world is fascinating – full of complexities, tensions, and contradictions. Social scientists have long been interested in better understanding the social world around us. Unlike quantitative research, that focuses on collecting and analyzing numerical data to make statistical inferences about the social world, qualitative research contributes to empirical and theoretical understandings of society by examining and explaining how and why people think and act as they do through the use of non-numerical data. In other words, qualitative research uncovers social processes and mechanisms undergirding human behavior. In this chapter, we will discuss how to design a qualitative research project using two of the most common qualitative research methods: in-depth interviewing and ethnographic observations (also known as ethnography or participant observation). We will begin the chapter by discussing the what, how, and why of interviewing and ethnography. We will then discuss the importance of interrogating one’s underlying ontological and epistemological assumptions regarding research (and the research process) and the steps to follow in designing a qualitative study. We conclude the chapter by reviewing the different elements to consider when developing a qualitative research project.

To give a clear understanding of authoritarian learning, the chapter provides a research design and methodology for better investigating authoritarian learning. Using the four cases of Belarus, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine we analyse the different aspects of authoritarian learning. Methodologically we use process-tracing and interviews to investigate the nuances of authoritarian learning. While not all the four case studies can be classified as authoritarian regimes, there are periods of attempted authoritarian consolidation in each and there are some elites with authoritarian tendencies across the four cases studied. The chapter offers research questions that the rest of the book will investigate to better understand the distinctions of authoritarian learning

This opening chapter sets the stage for the book. Its first part describes the author’s first day at The Farm community and the personal journey that brought her to explore the aging experiences of hippies. The second part of the chapter provides information about the study that served as the basis for this book, and the third part briefly presents the books contents.

Critics of commercial country music say that the music is homogenous, cliché, and that the so-called bro-country subgenre has taken over. This chapter uses interviews with hit songwriters in Nashville to examine the social and structural factors that influence the way songwriters practice their craft. One such factor, the “360 deal,” is a type of recording contract introduced as a way for record labels to recoup some of the revenue lost with the decline of recorded music sales. Though these contracts are legal agreements between artists and their labels, they have entirely restructured the careers of professional songwriters and the music that they create. This analysis of country music in the twenty-first century is based on a deep understanding of the occupational arrangements that underlie the creation of songs to argue for understanding the structures that shape the songwriting community as critical to the formation of country songs.

The preface describes the research methodology and the writing process that led to this book. It begins by explaining how the author collected information from the relevant sources, verified its completeness and accuracy, and analysed it under a unified framework. It then turns to the issue of storytelling style and to the author’s decision to present his findings in the form of a fictionalized account. In so doing, the preface discusses the problem of verifiability of classified information, the issue of trust between the narrator and the audience, and the promises and pitfalls of literary writing when it comes to informing, reporting, or commenting on real life.

Argentina transitioned from military dictatorship to democracy in 1983 and elected Raul Alfonsin as President. Alfonsin attempted to lower Argentin's tariffs and pass other neoliberal policies, but his economic reforms were blocked by a series of thirteen general strikes launched by the CGT, the labor union confederation led by Saul Ubaldini. When Alfonsin left office in 1989, Argentina's average tariffs still stood at 25 percent, only three percentage points lower than they had been in 1982, the last year of the military regime. By 1991, however, Alfonsin's successor, President Carlos Menem, was able to low tariffs to just 12 percent. This chapter tells the story of how Menem used labor repression to overcome union opposition and quickly open Argentina's economy.

Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the work of the Court of Protection (CoP) and mental capacity law, before setting out the core concepts and arguments of the book. The key argument is that the CoP has not effectively achieved access to justice for the subject of proceedings, particularly through its failure to sufficiently place their voice and participation at the centre of its work. This chapter outlines the key issues raised, including the extent to which CoP proceedings involve people affected by its decisions, the type of evidence it considers in reaching decisions on mental capacity and best interests, the ways in which its processes and spaces operate, and use of alternative ways of resolving CoP disputes.

This chapter shows how semi-structured interviews can contribute to the study of language attitudes. It pays particular attention to how understanding interviews as contextually and socially situated speech events, shaped by the spatial and temporal context in which they take place and the relationship between interviewer(s) and interviewee(s), is crucial for the analysis and interpretation of interview data. It addresses the strengths of using interviews to investigate attitudes (e.g. that they may bring to light new information, new topics, and new dimensions to established knowledge) as well as their limitations (e.g. that participants may say what they believe the interviewer wants to hear or agree with the interviewer’s questions, regardless of their content). Following a discussion of the key practical issues of planning and research design including constructing an interview protocol, choosing the language or variety to use in the interview, and presenting multiple languages or varieties in interview transcripts, it explains how the qualitative data resulting from semi-structured interviews can be analysed thematically. The chapter ends with an illustration of interview methodology on the basis of a case study of attitudes towards Cypriot Greek in London’s Greek Cypriot diaspora.

This chapter discusses the analysis of language attitudes as they are expressed in spoken interaction. Although the approach might be considered to have some limitations because it is generally confined to smaller samples of data, it offers valuable insights by providing greater contextualisation of attitudes as they are communicated, whilst also accounting for their fluid and shifting nature as they emerge in discourse. Key points of departure are ideas from discursive psychology and the application of discourse analysis to studying attitudes. The chapter proceeds to outline fundamental developments in this line of enquiry, ranging from work on discourse strategies to more recent research which has placed increasing focus on the elicitation and investigation of language attitudes in the context of interaction between the study participants. The chapter provides information on practical issues of planning and research design for such studies, followed by potential strategies for the analysis and interpretation of the resultant data. The main points arising from the discussion are illustrated by a case study undertaken in the post-industrial urban Ruhr region in Germany, where attitudes towards the local variety – Ruhrdeutsch – were investigated.