Cardiff Papers in Qualitative Research – serie

Geno-technology is a technology unlike any other, with significant implications for life in the 21st century. It directly affects us at a deeply personal level, it poses a threat to the boundaries which conventionally define selfhood, it generates potentially novel risks and dangers, and it threatens the very basis of accepted understandings of culture and society. This unique, exploratory volume discusses the ethical, cultural and philosophical issues surrounding the search for the 'book of life', focusing on the mapping of the human genome in Britain, the USA and Europe. It examines the impact of genetically modified crops, food and pharmacogenomics, along with the science and technology policy issues deriving from the human genome project. The authors investigate the potential risks and implications of the new genetics and conclude with a discussion of how nature may be reconfigured to underpin developments in health, commerce, state regulation and the law, both on a local and global scale.

This book argues for the importance of age as a source of diversity and difference amongst women. It compares three generations of women’s accounts of a range of gender issues, including the domestic division of labour, equality, abortion and sexuality. It also compares their understandings of and orientations toward the feminist movement. Drawing on Karl Mannheim’s argument that an individual’s location in historical time shapes their social outlooks or world views, it is shown that women of different ages do not share the same gendered life courses due to differing cohort memberships. Consequently, women of different ages interpret, define and give meaning to gender issues and to feminism in varied and contrasting ways. A key concern of the book is to show that findings from qualitative studies are an important supplement to surveys of cohort differences in women’s gender attitudes, in that they are more revealing of the complex ways cohort influences the construction of gender issues, including the very language used to do so.

Geno-technology is a technology unlike any other, with significant implications for life in the 21st century. It directly affects us at a deeply personal level, it poses a threat to the boundaries which conventionally define selfhood, it generates potentially novel risks and dangers, and it threatens the very basis of accepted understandings of culture and society. This unique, exploratory volume discusses the ethical, cultural and philosophical issues surrounding the search for the 'book of life', focusing on the mapping of the human genome in Britain, the USA and Europe. It examines the impact of genetically modified crops, food and pharmacogenomics, along with the science and technology policy issues deriving from the human genome project. The authors investigate the potential risks and implications of the new genetics and conclude with a discussion of how nature may be reconfigured to underpin developments in health, commerce, state regulation and the law, both on a local and global scale.

Contemporary political and public discourse has come alive with the issues and conflicts surrounding questions of national identity. Despite the widespread sociological attention it has drawn as a result, most studies of national identity have been conducted at considerable analytical distance from the lived reality of national identity talk. This collection brings together the work of contemporary researchers, situating the talk and interaction in which national identities are actually expressed and used. The book presents detailed investigations of how persons actually use national identity in their talk, the interactional uses to which such expressions are put, and the interactional consequences of such identity talk. The studies are based on transcribed tape recordings of naturally occurring talk across a variety of different countries and settings, illuminating not only situated national identity talk as a phenomenon in its own right, but also providing empirically grounded research for traditional sociological theorising about issues of integration, devolution and exclusion.

As qualitative researchers incorporate computer assistance into their analytic approaches, important questions arise about the adoption of new technology. Is it worth learning computer-assisted methods? Will the pay-off be sufficient to justify the investment? Which programs are worth learning? What are the effects on the analysis process? This book complements the existing literature by giving a detailed account of the use of four major programs in analyzing the same data. Priority is given to the tasks of qualitative analysis rather than to program capability and the programs are treated as tools rather than as a discipline to be acquired. The key is not what the programs allow researcher to do, but whether the tasks that researchers need to undertake are facilitated by the software. Thus the study develops a user-centred approach to the adoption of computer-assisted qualitative data analysis. The author emphasises qualitative analysis as a creative craft, but one which must increasingly be subject to rigorous methodological scrutiny. The adoption of computer-aided methods offers opportunities, but also dangers and ultimately this book is about the scientific qualitative research. Written in a distinctive and succinct style, this book will be valuable to social science researchers and students interested in qualitative research and in the potential for computer-assisted analysis.

This book argues for the importance of age as a source of diversity and difference amongst women. It compares three generations of women’s accounts of a range of gender issues, including the domestic division of labour, equality, abortion and sexuality. It also compares their understandings of and orientations toward the feminist movement. Drawing on Karl Mannheim’s argument that an individual’s location in historical time shapes their social outlooks or world views, it is shown that women of different ages do not share the same gendered life courses due to differing cohort memberships. Consequently, women of different ages interpret, define and give meaning to gender issues and to feminism in varied and contrasting ways. A key concern of the book is to show that findings from qualitative studies are an important supplement to surveys of cohort differences in women’s gender attitudes, in that they are more revealing of the complex ways cohort influences the construction of gender issues, including the very language used to do so.