Dr Tom Clark is a Lecturer in Research Methods at the University of Sheffield, UK. He is interested in all aspects of methods and methodology, particularly with respect to learning and teaching. His other interests have variously focussed on the sociology of evil, student experiences of higher education, and football fandom. Tom's work has been published in a wide variety of journals, including Sociology, Qualitative Research, Social Policy and Administration, Teaching in Higher Education, the Journal of Education and Work, and Qualitative Social Work.

Dr Liam Foster is a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy and Social Work at the University of Sheffield, UK, who specializes in pensions and theories of ageing. Liam also has a longstanding interest in methods and has published widely in this area, including Beginning Statistics for Social Scientists (with Sir Ian Diamond and Dr Julie Jefferies). He has been an invited speaker at the Department for Education, Department for Work and Pensions, the European Parliament in Brussels, the House of Lords, and the UN in New York, as a world leading expert on ageing. Liam is a member of the UK Social Policy Association Executive Committee. He is also the Managing Editor of Social Policy and Society.

Dr Luke Sloan is a Reader, Deputy Director of the Social Data Science Lab, and Co-Director of Cardiff Q-Step at the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, UK. Luke's internationally recognised work focuses on exploring how social media data, specifically from Twitter, can be used for social scientific research. He is co-editor of the SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods and has published widely on how Twitter can help us understand social phenomena and the ethics of using this data for research. His work has appeared in journals including Sociology, Social Media + Society, the British Journal of Criminology, Electoral Studies, PLoS ONE, and the Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics.

Alan Bryman was Professor of Organizational and Social Research at the University of Leicester from 2005 to 2017. Prior to this he was Professor of Social Research at Loughborough University for 31 years. His main research interests were in leadership, especially in higher education, research methods (particularly mixed methods research), and the 'Disneyization' and 'McDonaldization' of modern society. Alan also co-authored Business Research Methods (Oxford University Press, 2018), helped conceive of How to do your Social Research Project or Dissertation (Oxford University Press, 2019), and contributed to a range of leading journals: he was an extraordinarily well-cited and internationally renowned social scientist.

• Part 1: The research process


• 1: The nature and process of social research


• 2: Social research strategies: quantitative research and qualitative research


• 3: Research designs


• 4: Planning a research project and formulating research questions


• 5: Reviewing the literature


• 6: Ethics and politics in social research


• Part 2: Quantitative research


• 7: The nature of quantitative research


• 8: Sampling in quantitative research


• 9: Structured interviewing


• 10: Self-completion questionnaires


• 11: Asking questions


• 12: Structured observation


• 13: Content analysis


• 14: Using existing data


• 15: Quantitative data analysis


• Part 3: Qualitative research


• 16: The nature of qualitative research


• 17: Sampling in qualitative research


• 18: Ethnography and participant observation


• 19: Interviewing in qualitative research


• 20: Focus groups


• 21: Language in qualitative research


• 22: Documents as sources of data


• 23: Qualitative data analysis


• Part 4: Mixed methods research and writing up


• 24: Mixed methods research


• 25: Writing up social research