Making sense of lived experiences through narratives
2026-03-19 13:00 - 14:00 (Europe/London)
Understanding home deathcare through narrative.
Sam Hooker, SWDTP-funded PhD researcher in Social Policy at the University of Bath
My PhD project used a narrative methodology to capture people’s experiences caring for the dead at home. Two interviews were conducted with participants. The first consisted of asking them to tell me their experience, while the second was used to ask questions to fill in gaps in the narratives. Then, in the participant’s own words, a chronological narrative of the event (core story) was formed, which reads like a short story of their experience. This process was an emotionally taxing experience for me as a researcher, due to the depth of immersion in the data. The core stories are included in the thesis, allowing the data to remain situated, capturing the complexity of a very personal and challenging experience for participants. While additional analysis is included, the core stories allow the reader to draw conclusions from the data itself. They also provide a valuable resource for people who wish to take care of their own dead to learn from.

Putting a light in the window: using creative writing to focus analysis in relationally engaged research
Luci Gorell Barnes, PhD researcher in Education at UWE Bristol
My PhD investigates how relationally engaged arts-based research methods can support minoritised children to express, reflect on, and amplify their lived experiences and perceptions. I understand meaning-making as happening through the process of engagement, and gathered data to consider the ‘double hermeneutic’ (Smith and Eatough, 2021) of not only what the children expressed, but how they did this through their conversations, interactions, and demeanours.
This study focuses on the children’s unique experiences and I wanted to examine what I had learned from each child, foregrounding how they had ‘got under my skin’. Having familiarised myself with the data I then drew on less conscious or orthodox ways of knowing (Hammond and Fuller, 2024) to write what I think of as ‘fictional portraits’ of my encounters with individual children. These were informed by the issues that child explored, the metaphors and images they used, and how they had interacted with me and each other. Using this process helped me get close to each child’s ‘internal narrative’ Mannay (2010, p.10) and I came to understand each ‘portrait’ as being like a light in the window guiding me through the dark woods of data, focusing my analysis and supporting me to write interpretive accounts that kept the relational nature of the study at their heart. McNiff (2019) suggests that fact and fiction can work together to deepen our understandings, and by engaging with my data in this highly subjective and ‘interruptive’ way (Clark, 2024, p. 3) I brought a level of relational accuracy to my analysis that I might not have otherwise found.
This session is part of the SWDTP Data Analysis Webinar Series. Visit the following link for further information and registration: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/swdtp/1956811

Visual mapping for data analysis
2026-03-31 13:00 - 14:00
Visual mapping of process data
Prof. Peter Turnbull, Professor of Management at the University of Bristol
In several studies we have used visual mapping to depict changes over time and the (inter)action of the key players that we focus on in our research. We draw on the work of Anne Langley and others on “process research methods”, using our visual maps for “temporal bracketing” and the application of “alternative templates” to explain (inter)action in each period and establish not simply “what’s going on here” but “what is this case of”?
I could give a couple of examples from our research on: (i) the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the ILO’s (failed) attempt to develop a Convention (international labour standard) for decent work in global supply chains, published in Human Relations, and (ii) a recent paper on (successful) trade union resistance to the introduction of new technology in air traffic control, published in New Technology, Work and Employment.
The ILO study was based on a rich ethnographic dataset. My co-author worked at the ILO for 2.5 years during the deliberations on the proposed Convention and my own work with the ILO dates back to 1999. We encountered some rather very difficult challenges using these data as much of the “real work” at the ILO takes place “behind closed doors” and is therefore not part of the public record.
The study of trade union resistance to new technology (digital towers) was more straightforward as we have a close working relationship with Prospect (the union that represents air traffic controllers and technical staff) and Members of the Scottish Parliament who also opposed the plans were more than willing to discuss their concerns.

Art-based Mapping: an analysis of where teenagers spend their breaktime in school
Zifi Tung, PhD researcher at the University of Bath
For decades, research on play has primarily focused on young children, emphasizing its benefits for social, physical, and cognitive development (Lindon, 2007; Casey, 2010, Jawabri et al, 2023).) This study shifts the focus to adolescents, examining the nature of their playful experiences within a school setting. Data collection methods include map-making, observations, and focus group discussions.
This presentation focuses on the analysis of art-based maps created by students from year 7,8,9,10 and 12. Art-based mapping techniques have been widely applied in urban planning and the study of adolescent spatial experiences (Lynch,1960; Thomson and Philo,2004; Travlou et al, 2008; Webber et al, 2014). In this study, map-making was utilized to identify where students spend their break and lunch times, their favourite and least favourite locations, and restricted areas within the school.
By using content analysis, findings indicate across all year groups, most participants spend their free time with friends. During lunch, students are primarily engaged in eating, queuing for food, and socializing with peers. Significantly, only boys were shown to be playing football on the astro turf, there were no girls reported to spend time there. These results underscore the significance of friendship and questions whether the breaktime experiences are gendered.
This session is part of the SWDTP Data Analysis Webinar Series. Visit the following link for further information and registration: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/swdtp/1956811

Introduction to Longitudinal Data Analysis with R
2026-04-16 09:30 - 13:30
This four-hour workshop offers a practical introduction to panel and longitudinal data analysis (LDA) using R. Panel data—observations of the same individuals, organisations, or countries across multiple time points—are central to identifying causal relationships and accounting for unobserved factors in the social sciences.

The workshop introduces the core concepts and applied techniques of LDA, drawing on perspectives from sociology, econometrics, and data science. Participants will learn when LDA is appropriate, how to structure and prepare panel datasets, and how to implement common modelling approaches in R. Through short lectures, code demonstrations, and guided exercises, students will learn to work with Fixed Effects and Random Effects models, address unobserved heterogeneity, and choose suitable models for their own research.

The workshop covers:

Fundamentals of panel data: definitions, when to use LDA, and essential data management strategies.
Key longitudinal modelling approaches: handling unobserved heterogeneity, Fixed Effects and Random Effects models, model selection, and basic robustness checks.
Applied examples and case studies illustrating LDA in practice.

To find out more or to book tickets please follow the link below.

Excellence at Interview- Grants and Jobs Masterclass
2026-04-21 09:30 - 12:00 | Online
An interview is a precious opportunity to make a positive, memorable impression and advance a researcher’s career. Thorough preparation is vital, and that means working on style as well as content. The way candidates conduct themselves, present ideas and respond to questions has a powerful influence on the way they are perceived. Even an academic front-runner can come unstuck if he or she lacks ‘presence’ and has difficulty interacting with others.

The topics addressed include:
• Principles of effective interviews
• Managing nerves and appearing confident
• Achieving physical and vocal presence
• Engaging the interview panel
• Responding convincingly to questions.

Course participants learn how to do themselves justice under interview conditions. They develop a clearer, more authoritative interview style that allows the strength of their ideas to shine through. After the course, you’ll be able to get access to a course summary, follow-up material and the VOX Academy – an online repository of written guidance, lively videos and other resources to help you extend your learning and take your communication skills to the next level.

Posthuman data analysis?
2026-04-21 10:30 - 12:00
“Entanglement makes all the categories of humanist qualitative research problematic.” (Lather and St. Pierre, 2013)
How does our analysis shift when we stop asking ‘What does this data show?’ and instead ask ‘Who and what is this data entangled with, and how can we stay accountable to those relations?’
This webinar invites pondering of the joys and challenges that emerge with data analysis when social researchers embrace their entangled inseparability from the world being researched. We explore what becomes possible when we analyse data as an experiment in relations rather than attempting to represent a universal reality. By considering the posthuman ontological turn and its implications for social sciences research, we, a group of posthumanist, feminist materialist, post-qualitative educational researchers, share some of the processes and techniques that we employed as we grappled with the process of meaning making in our research projects. Through matter, waters, bodies, silences, we consider what our more-than-human data might say, if it could speak, and how such voices might re-shape the ways we engage with the worlds around us, when we listen more expansively.
By showcasing examples of ‘how did we do it’, this webinar is suitable for researchers at any career stage, including ECRs, who are either working with posthuman data analysis, or are curious about practices that challenge conventional ways of doing social sciences research. In addition, the webinar will provide an interactive opportunity for participants to engage in posthuman data analysis through practical examples. Anonymised data examples will be provided, or participants are welcome to bring their own.
This session is part of the SWDTP Data Analysis Webinar Series. Visit the following link for further information and registration: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/swdtp/1956811

Consultancy Skills Training
2026-04-23 10:30 - 12:30
This participative workshop run by How2Glu will help you to identify and develop key consultancy skills, practical approaches to developing client relationships, and workshop common issues.
First, we will look at drivers and prospective client / partner expectations and the characteristics of successful client consultant / partner-advisor relationships. We will then focus on essential ‘soft’ skills for consultancy – communication, flexibility and collaboration. You will identify your strengths and areas for growth and explore strategies to develop and utilise these skills. During the session you will use glucard™ tools to help you identify ways of ‘adding value’ and ways to build / translate relationships for ‘upselling’, repeat business and recommendations. We will look at different consultancy models, such as salaried, freelance, associate, and internal consultancy and consider how Intellectual Property (IP) relates to consultancy. Sabina will graphically illustrate concepts and demonstrate tools by sharing live visualisations. We will discuss common issues in consultancy and workshop ways to overcome them. We will use real examples and methods that are accessible, visual and hands-on and mindful of the present context that will help you develop consultancy skills and opportunities.

Follow the link below for tickets.

Handling data in decolonial research
2026-04-30 13:00 - 14:00
The Messy Realities of Anticolonial Research: Reimagining Language Practices in Secondary Education in Nigeria
Mercy Martins, PhD researcher in Education at the University of Bath
My research explores how language practices in Nigerian secondary schools can be reimagined using anticolonial concepts of agency and resistance. The research design was indigenous, weaving qualitative, creative, and participatory methods that were flexible and aligned with the daily experiences of my collaborators. Structured in two phases, the first focused on the voices of marginalised students, while the second included teachers, parents, school management, and leadership.
After securing ethics approval, I conducted a small online pilot with local collaborators which informed my choice of a school with linguistic, ethnic, and religious parity. I prioritised depth in one all-male secondary school rather than breadth across two schools due to time constraints. Almost five months of fieldwork produced extensive data. To preserve Nigerian Pidgin and avoid rough translations, I transcribed and cleaned the data manually. Journalling and a participatory analysis session, where students directly engaged with the research questions, guided the analysis.
While I set aside some methods (such as Theatre of the Oppressed and parent interviews) for future work, I sought to include multiple perspectives, centre participant voices, and clearly distinguish between their ideas and mine. Ethical tensions included deciding what to share, avoiding reductive categorisation, and ensuring authenticity.

Storytelling, Embodiment, and the Ethics of Analysing Bedouin Ethnography
Wesam Wekhyan, PhD researcher in Social Policy at the University of Bath
My PhD research explores Bedouin identity, knowledge, and community praxis in central Jordan through a decolonial, feminist ethnographic approach. The dataset is multi-modal: focus groups, one-to-one interviews, oral histories, WhatsApp notes, photos, videos, fieldnotes, memos, and observations of ceremonies and everyday life (weddings, funerals, dinners, walkabouts). Much of this material was produced in a Bedouin dialect and a culture where history is preserved orally rather than textually, requiring translation across dialect, Arabic, and English, as well as from embodied, performative expression into written form. Virtual data (voice notes, chats, images) extended this storytelling into digital space.
Writing was not separate from analysis, but a continuation of storytelling: through memos, vignettes, and embodied descriptions I traced how narratives lived, moved, and transformed across settings and generation. Analysing such material meant making decisions about segmentation and representation without erasing relational meaning. Ethical and personal challenges were constant: anonymity in small communities, safeguarding oral/visual data sovereignty, and navigating my insider–outsider position and the embodied emotional labour of researching from within.
This session is part of the SWDTP Data Analysis Webinar Series. Visit the following link for further information and registration: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/swdtp/1956811

Analysing media discourses
2026-05-05 13:00 - 14:00
Higher Education in Nigerian public discourse
Yusuf Olaniyan, SWDTP-funded PhD researcher in Education at the University of Bath
This presentation will discuss the methodological approach and data analysis techniques used in my study of how higher education (HE) is constructed within Nigerian public discourse. The research combines media analysis with a discourse-historical approach (DHA) to explicate how HE is framed in Nigerian national news medias. It focuses specifically on the post-COVID period, and the introduction of the National Universities Commission’s (NUC) Core Curriculum and Minimum Academic Standards (CCMAS) polices. The study used 331 media articles from three major Nigerian news media (Punch, Daily Trust, and Daily Post), published between 2021 and 2022, which focused on the intersections of vocational education, entrepreneurship, skills training, and apprenticeship-like pathways in the context of HE reforms. Through a two-phase analytical process, the first phase involved a quantitative scan to map the frequency and thematic emphasis of HE discussions in the media, highlighting the economic framing of HE around employability and market-driven outcomes. The second phase employed DHA to visibilised the ideological functions of these discourses. It also investigates how HE policies were legitimized, how social actors were positioned, and how historical continuities were reproduced in the media. Through this methodology, the presentation will illustrate how media discourses serve both framing and gatekeeping functions to determining which perspectives on HE are amplified or marginalised. It will highlight the challenges of conducting discourse analysis on publicly available media data, as well as the methodological and theoretical benefits of combining quantitative content analysis with a qualitative DHA framework. This session will be useful for doctoral researchers like me and early-career researchers interested in media analysis, discourse studies, and the intersection of policy, education, and public opinion in national contexts.

How do social media influencers legitimise veganism on YouTube?
Adrianna Jerzierska, PhD researcher in Business Studies at the University of Bristol
In this presentation, I will outline the methodological framework used in my PhD project, which aims to understand how social media influencers have legitimised veganism over time, by analysing approximately 8,000 YouTube videos posted between 2014 and 2024.
During this workshop, I will discuss the computational theory construction and the qualitative techniques used to study the discursive legitimation strategies by which influencers mainstream veganism. The first phase of the analysis involves generating the Dynamic BERT topic model (DTM). BERT is a large language model (LLM) that performs language tasks, such as distilling clusters of documents with similar semantic topics. By incorporating temporal analysis of topics, researchers can effectively track lexical changes across topics, leading to a deeper understanding of discursive legitimacy over time. The second stage involves the qualitative interpretation of the machine output by adopting a qualitative content analysis of the videos to contextualise the discursive strategies used by online actors.
Given that BERT performs best with short texts compared to long and noisy YouTube video transcripts, this was a significant challenge to overcome. In this webinar, I will discuss the decisions made to work within these limitations, as well as provide a brief overview of the analytical framework, from querying and downloading videos using the YouTube API to discussing AI tools for converting large audio files into transcripts.
This session is part of the SWDTP Data Analysis Webinar Series. Visit the following link for further information and registration: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/swdtp/1956811

Analysing qualitative data with diverse co-researcher and advisory input: Participatory qualitative methods in co-produced research with young people and parents
2026-05-07 11:00 - 12:00
Participatory research is a collaborative approach to inquiry that actively involves stakeholders, like community members, service users, or practitioners, in the design, implementation, and interpretation of research. These approaches can be applied to qualitative research across a wide range of fields, ensuring that study findings are relevant, inclusive, and impactful. The spotLight on Adolescent and young adult Mood Problems (LAMP) group at the University of Bath will present their experiences of using a participatory research approach in qualitative studies, with a focus on data collection/collation and analysis.
The first two presentations will focus on aspects of the Can We Connect with young people study, which was a qualitative interview study (n = 24 13-18 year olds) exploring where young people look online for early mental health support and what they think of what they find. Prof Maria Loades will set the context for the study and its aims, and describe how we involved young people as advisors and co-researchers. Dr Nina Higson-Sweeney will then specifically describe how we conducted the qualitative reflexive thematic analysis as a team, which included young co-researchers. The third presentation by Natalia Kika will describe the challenges we encountered with involving parents in a qualitative systematic review, and how those learnings helped us involve the LAMP parent advisory group (PAG) in the analysis of qualitative interviews with parents. The webinar will also highlight approaches that are feasible for PGRs and early-career researchers, including resource-efficient co-production strategies and practical tips for sustaining meaningful engagement and partnerships across projects.
This session is part of the SWDTP Data Analysis Webinar Series. Visit the following link for further information and registration: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/swdtp/1956811

Critical Discourse Analysis: Methods and Approaches
2026-05-14 11:00 - 12:00
The study of language is a key component of social science research. Studies range from critical analyses of media discourse to historical approaches that uncover how language changes over time, from micro-level analyses of pronunciation to macro-level examinations of the consequences of governmental policy. Language can tell us a great deal about society, and society can tell us a great deal about language. Research in linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and the sociology of language is methodologically and epistemologically rich. This session will introduce you to an approach that is both widespread and extremely useful beyond linguistics: critical discourse analysis (CDA). We will cover central aspects of CDA and explain how this method can be used on a variety of data.
This session is part of the SWDTP Data Analysis Webinar Series. Visit the following link for further information and registration: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/swdtp/1956811

Using co-produced data in the doctorate
2026-05-19 13:00 - 14:00
Beginning from the Inside Out: The Value of Pilot Studies in Decolonial Research
Kate Matzopoulos, PhD researcher in Education at the University of Bath
This presentation explores the value of conducting a pilot study prior to larger-scale research, particularly when working with Indigenous and decolonial methodologies that are still in experimental phases and not widely documented in education research. My context, with the Ju/’hoansi San community in Namibia, is not widely written about outside of anthropology, which meant that I had to draw from other Indigenous scholarship to piece together meaningful approaches.
My pilot study, carried out during my master’s research, was foundational in forming authentic relationships with the community. Relationality became the hinge on which the work rests: research emerges in and through relationships, shifting with daily life rather than fitting into neat methodological boundaries. The pilot also revealed how to engage respectfully across difference and avoid reproducing colonial knowledge systems that obscure reality.
Ultimately, the study affirmed the importance of beginning research from the “inside out,” allowing Indigenous people to act as co-researchers working from their own onto-epistemologies, rather than being framed by external categories or outsider lenses. This informs my ongoing fieldwork in my PhD studies.

Conducting a pilot to trial photo diary instructions and assess the data generated
Louise Toller, SWDTP alumni in Sociology at the University of Exeter
My PhD research investigated the experiences of chronically ill young adults using a combination of verbal and visual methods, specifically participant-generated photographs and photo elicitation interviews. In this presentation, I describe how I used a pilot study to develop my visual method, essential due to both my lack of prior experience and the lack of detailed information in published studies. I conducted a pilot with two main objectives: to trial the draft photo diary instructions I would give to participants, and to assess the sort of data the photographs generated. I reflect on what I learned from the pilot, and the modifications I then made to the photo-based phases of the main study, highlighting lessons that I would not have gained without carrying out a pilot.
This session is part of the SWDTP Data Analysis Webinar Series. Visit the following link for further information and registration: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/swdtp/1956811
