New Volume Published by CAIJ Members

Tue. Oct. 15, 2019

Kevin Walby and Alex Luscombe recently published Freedom of Information and Social Science Research Design (2019, London: Routledge). The multidisciplinary volume demonstrates how freedom of information law and processes can contribute to social science research design across sociology, criminology, political science, anthropology, journalism and education. Comparing the use of freedom of information in research design across the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Canada and South Africa, it provides readers with resources to carry out freedom of information requests and considers the influence such requests can have on debates within multiple disciplines. In addition to exploring how scholars can use freedom of information disclosures in conjunction with interview data, archival data and other datasets, the collection explains how researchers can systematically analyse freedom of information disclosures. Considering the challenges and dilemmas in using freedom of information processes in research, it examines the reasons why many scholars continue to rely on more easily accessible data, when much of the real work of governance, the more clandestine but consequential decisions and policy moves made by government officials, can only be accessed using freedom of information requests.