Justice and the Politics of Difference

Over the past decades, the concept of values has gone in and out of fashion within sociology. Relatively recent advances in both the conceptualization and measurement of values offer the potential for a reincorporation of values into sociological work. Sociologists often employ cursory understandings of values, imbuing values with too much determinism or viewing them as too individually subjective. The concept is employed sporadically in sociological subdisciplines. This review maps out the contours of the various approaches to linking values with culture, social structure, and individual behavior. We discuss theoretical and empirical approaches to values, organizing the broad literature to address three questions: (a) What are values? (b) Where do values come from? and (c) What do values do? We identify important research findings and suggest areas for future inquiry.

Values: Reviving a Dormant Concept

This article makes an argument for a ‘qualitatively driven’ approach to mixing methods. It focuses on the value of mixed-methods approaches for researching questions about social experience and lived realities. It suggests that ‘qualitative thinking’ is a useful starting point for mixing methods, but that it is ultimately more helpful to think in terms of multi-dimensional research strategies that transcend or even subvert the so-called qualitative-quantitative divide. Mixing methods helps us to think creatively and ‘outside the box’, to theorize beyond the micro-macro divide, and to enhance and extend the logic of qualitative explanation. Mixed-methods approaches raise challenges in reconciling different epistemologies and ontologies, and in integrating different forms of data and knowledge. The article argues that we should think more in terms of ‘meshing’ or ‘linking’ than ‘integrating’ data and method. It goes on to argue for the development of ‘multi-nodal’ dialogic explanations that allow the distin...

Mixing methods in a qualitatively driven way

The `Inventing Adulthoods' study seeks to document transitions to adulthood reported by over 100 young people living in five contrasting communities in the UK over a five-year period. A principal a...

Critical moments: Choice, chance and opportunity in young people's narratives of transition

The moral significance of class

There has been a significant growth in the infrastructure for archiving and sharing qualitative data, facilitating reuse and secondary analysis. The article explores some issues relating to ethics and epistemology in the conduct of qualitative secondary analysis. It also offers a critical discussion of the importance of engaging with the situatedness and contextually embedded nature of data, and ways in which contexts (including research designs and disciplinary and methodological assumptions) are themselves embedded in primary data. I illustrate some strategies for addressing these matters with reference to analyses of two different areas, drawing on research conducted as part of ESRC Timescapes, and highlight some issues for development research.

Qualitative secondary data analysis: Ethics, epistemology and context

The article presents an analysis of new empirical evidence on parenting values and orientations to children’s education and social class. A survey of parents with children involved in organized activities was undertaken, followed by a series of semi-structured interviews with a sample strategically identified with reference to both social class and subjective orientations to education. We argue that within recent literature there has been a tendency towards overstating the internal homogeneity of middle-class and working-class experiences. Our data reveal diverse parental orientations to their children’s education within, as well as across, classes. We analyse this diversity in relation to varied circumstances, and draw out some implications for theories of inequality.

Concerted Cultivation? Parenting Values, Education and Class Diversity

Locating transition economic change and the transition from youth to adulthood demographic change and rites of passage - locating "new" life-cycle transitions earnings, gender and reproduction lifestyles, orientations and occupational careers age-related distributive justice.

Rights Of Passage: Social Change And The Transition From Youth To Adulthood

The assumption of individualised rationality runs through the two dominant theorisations of family behaviour – new household economics and individualisation. We demonstrate the inaccuracy of this assumption, using the results of two CAVA projects into mothers' perceptions and choices in combining mothering with paid work, in allocating tasks with partners, and in choosing childcare. Rather, mothers make such decisions within socially negotiated accounts of what is morally adequate, and we go on to show how these decisions and the values informing them are socially patterned by class and ethnicity. Finally, we consider how both theory and policy can make a ‘rationality mistake’ in neglecting the importance of social ties and moral responsibilities in family life.

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The Social Patterning of Values and Rationalities: Mothers' Choices in Combining Caring and Employment

Qualitative research has generated important insights into the intersection of social class, parental values and children's experiences of education and their role in the reproduction of inequaliti...

Sarah Irwin

Papers

Qualitative secondary data analysis: Ethics, epistemology and context

Concerted Cultivation? Parenting Values, Education and Class Diversity

Rights Of Passage: Social Change And The Transition From Youth To Adulthood

The Social Patterning of Values and Rationalities: Mothers' Choices in Combining Caring and Employment

Parents' Hopes and Expectations for Their Children's Future Occupations: