Abstract
Social work policy and practice is becoming increasingly concerned with taking due account of multiple perspective taking in its understanding of how it responds to complex phenomena in partnership with those most adversely affected by economic, environmental and social injustice. With the insistent calls for this to be informed by an evidence base, social work research continues to encounter the task of how best to capture collaboration, reflexivity and richness through its methodologies. This edition provides an illuminating response to these challenges.
Bryant’s edition openly starts from interpretivist positions and, in its departure from more normative research textbook preoccupations with positive design and process, provides a compendium of two distinct halves. Drawing together an international authorship, of predominantly Australian, European and Israeli scholars, this book explores the key considerations of how we can better understand the construction of the research narrative and how this might additionally be supported using visual and textual methodologies. What I really like about this book is how it confronts orthodoxy. This book puts people, place and time as the central tenets to understanding, rather than expert observation and experimentally reinforced interventions. Further, it places real value on perceptions of culture, self and others. In doing so, it offers examples of how qualitative research can and does support this.
The first half of the book explores interpretations of textual data. So, how ethnographic longitudinal review helps us explore the impact of sexual violence or autoethnography improves reflexive considerations about experiences of indigenous populations. In total, five chapters explore highly participative deliberations, focusing on indigenous and women’s experiences. Importantly here, several of the chapters explore the problematic nature of research by non-indigenous researchers on indigenous populations. There is often a loss of communication, culture, understanding and values in the process of interpretation and translation. The second half of the book opens the reader up to the possibilities that forms like: clay, digital media, drawing, film, photographs and poetry offer in furthering our understanding of such subjects as: abusive relationships; alcohol and sexual crime; food security, gender and telephony and online communities. Each of the chapters provides details of theoretical starting points, core methodological considerations and applied examples of data collection and analysis.
Bryant usefully summarises her conclusions on the contributions as ‘social creativity and social change’. This neatly encapsulates the embedded strength of this captivating collection. So, while the book introduces examples, ideas and approaches for those less familiar with the methodological applications, it demands that social work and its researchers think beyond the mainstream and of the disenfranchised. This compendium is of value to student, practitioner and researcher alike. It has strong messages about the need to rethink acquired positions and understanding. I think this book asks questions of the Academe and its role in reinforcing the status quo through a dominance of traditional research that often seeks to support the policy maker and university researcher, before it does those experiencing discomfort and need. While not an overtly feminist text, it is rightly a book focusing on women’s experiences with a predominantly female authorship. The status quo is after all patriarchal. In one sense, this book is an assertion of the legitimacy of alternative voices, both researcher and researched. Its message is quite simple; there are other equally valid and contributing social work research methods, many of which can tell stories that need telling, which up until now have been marginalised within the traditionally dominant paradigms.