The police, their methods, and their relations with the community had been the focus of considerable criticism and debate in the 1980s. While there were few books available on police training, it was widely recognised that training lay at the heart of many initiatives for police reform. Originally published in 1988, this book, based on a five-year study, provides a detailed picture of the training of police recruits in Britain at the time. The results themselves have centre stage in the book, which addresses questions basic to any working group: what kind of people join; whether they think the job changes them; their evaluation of the training and their officers; their thoughts on new policies such ass equal opportunities and community policing. A direct connection is made between the recruits’ impressions and experiences and their growing conception of what makes for good policing. The book traces how their attitudes to the force and their own roles change as they become familiar with the work and the occupational culture. The formal and informal socialization process is a crucial influence on the standards of competence which lie behind every contact between police and public and is central to our understanding of how the police operate. The author is a well-known researcher in the police world both here and in the USA. He relates his findings throughout to the North American experience, which provides valuable points of comparison. The important new material he presents informs debate and will still be of keen interest to students and researchers in the field.

Social scientists have always recognised a divergence between approaches which emphasise the constraining power of social structure and those which interpret society through the cumulative effects of actions of individuals. In recent years there has been renewed interest in the latter through the micro-sociology of everyday life. Social scientists are now taking stock of the implications of micro-sociological research for the analysis of structure and the macro-level theory of society. In Actions and Structure the value of micro-sociological research for the analysis of social order is assessed. Individual chapters evaluate new research approaches from discourse and conversational analysis, mathematical, interactionist and phenomenological sociologies and network analysis. Throughout the authors assess how these approaches contribute to current debates around theoretical formulations of organization, structure and power.

A new turn in mixed methods research is here: merged methods. This provocative book offers a novel analysis of current mixed methods research, complicating traditional approaches and challenging existing techniques. Moving beyond the binary quantitative-qualitative distinction, the book presents methodologically grounded ways to merge methods in social research and integrate interpretive and structural approaches in one instrument or procedure. The book: Considers the importance of merging both epistemologies and methodologies. Showcases eight merged methods research approaches, from the Delphi method to multimodal content analysis. Explores the opportunities for merging methods using computational techniques, such as text mining. This innovative book is a must-read for any postgraduate student or researcher across the social sciences wanting to develop their understanding of mixed methods research.

A new turn in mixed methods research is here: merged methods. This provocative book offers a novel analysis of current mixed methods research, complicating traditional approaches and challenging existing techniques. Moving beyond the binary quantitative-qualitative distinction, the book presents methodologically grounded ways to merge methods in social research and integrate interpretive and structural approaches in one instrument or procedure. The book: Considers the importance of merging both epistemologies and methodologies. Showcases eight merged methods research approaches, from the Delphi method to multimodal content analysis. Explores the opportunities for merging methods using computational techniques, such as text mining. This innovative book is a must-read for any postgraduate student or researcher across the social sciences wanting to develop their understanding of mixed methods research.

Online research methods are popular, dynamic and fast-changing. Following on from the great success of the first edition, published in 2008, The SAGE Handbook of Online Research Methods, Second Edition offers both updates of existing subject areas and new chapters covering more recent developments, such as social media, big data, data visualization and CAQDAS. Bringing together the leading names in both qualitative and quantitative online research, this new edition is organised into nine sections: 1. Online Research Methods 2. Designing Online Research 3. Online Data Capture and Data Collection 4. The Online Survey 5. Digital Quantitative Analysis 6. Digital Text Analysis 7. Virtual Ethnography 8. Online Secondary Analysis: Resources and Methods 9. The Future of Online Social Research The SAGE Handbook of Online Research Methods, Second Edition is an essential resource for anyone interested in the contemporary practice of computer-mediated research and scholarship.

Professionalizing the Police is a timely reassessment of the development of British police training and its contribution to the furtherance of the police professionalism agenda. The police have long struggled with the concept of professionalism. The Victorians veered from regarding police as servants to sanctifying policing as a special calling, while the supposed Golden Age of Policing was riven by divisions of class as sharp as those of the social diversity that poses one of contemporary policing's harshest tests. Police training has reflected these ambiguities and uncertainties. The ground its curriculum covers, pedagogy it employs, and structures through which it operates have been contested, troublesome to manage, and blamed for policing's failures. Behind these frictions lie large issues of governance, policing's place in society and what it means to be professional. Late modernity is marked by uncertainty and scepticism. In 'post-truth' times, professionalism must accommodate ambiguities of class, ethnicity and sexuality. The police languish as last believers in a monochrome vision of society while the norms that make for contemporary sociality have moved on to a multiplex of diversities that harbour new extremes both of tolerance and intolerance. True professionalism alerts practitioners to other ways of delivering social control and just societies: empowering citizens and encouraging autonomy; supporting new modes of social relationships and lifestyle; fitting provision to cases; pluralizing services. This yardstick is used to assess and challenge the recruit and in-service curriculum and to tease out the options around which professionalism can be configured and embedded such that it plays its part in a humane, coherent, and accountable framework of police governance. The book will appeal to academics and postgraduate students in police research (across criminology, sociology, psychology, socio-legal studies) and the professions (sociology, political science), as well as senior police managers and trainers in the police service and other applied government bodies.

The use of computers in qualitative research has redefined the way social researchers handle qualitative data. Two leading researchers in the field have written this lucid and accessible text on the principal approaches in qualitative research and show how the leading computer programs are used in computer-assisted qualitative data analysis (CAQDAS).

The authors examine the advantages and disadvantages of computer use, the impact of research resources and the research environment on the research process, and the status of qualitative research. They provide a framework for developing the craft and practice of CAQDAS and conclude by examining the latest techniques and their implications for the evolution of qualitative resear

This is a comprehensive assessment of recent developments in the use of computers in qualitative research, an increasingly important and rapidly growing area of interest among social scientists and graduate students.

Using Computers in Qualitative Research profiles and compares the principal programs available, identifying their particular strengths and limitations. It outlines the sorts of research problems that existing and forthcoming software can and cannot handle. The contributors also draw on their experiences of teaching computer-based techniques to suggest ways in which these could be incorporated into research methods training. Reprinted with updated information on computer resources, 1992]