Doing Excellent Small-Scale Research

Derek Layder is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Leicester and Honorary Professor of Health and Life Sciences and De Montfort University. He was awarded a doctorate by the London School of Economics in 1976. Appointed Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Leicester in 1974 and promoted to Reader in 1995, he became Professor in 1997 and Emeritus Professor from 2002. He has held several visiting academic positions and has also held honorary visiting appointments at The Australian National University (as a Humanities Research Fellow) and the University of Western Sydney (as Eminent Research Visitor). He taught in areas of social theory, social psychology, social research methods and the philosophy of social sciences. He has published numerous academic articles and 12 books. Among his books, in the area of the philosophy of social science, he is the author of The Realist Image in Social Science (1990); in social theory, he has written Understanding Social Theory (second edition, 2006), as well as Modern Social Theory (1997). On research strategies and methods, he has authored New Strategies in Social Research (1993), Sociological Practice (1998), and Doing Excellent Small-Scale Research (2013). He has also written on intimacy, emotion and self-identity, including Emotion in Social Life (2004), Social & Personal Identity (2004) and Intimacy & Power (2009).

• Overview of the Adaptive ApproachFinding a Research Topic and a Research ProblemDeveloping Questions from Research ProblemsPreparation and Project DesignQualitative Data and Mixed StrategiesQuantitative Data and Mixed StrategiesImaginative SamplingData Analysis: Concepts and CodingWriting the Research Report: Arguments and ExplanationsGuidelines and Checklist for Adaptive Research

Layder′s adaptive approach answers the question that many social science researchers (particularly students) grapple with-how do I conduct (and justify) research grounded in both local-level data and pre-existing theory! Dr Laurie FieldSenior Lecturer, Faculty of Human Sciences , Macquarie University, Sydney