Meeting CRESC

Today we visited the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) at the University of Manchester. CRESC is an ESRC funded Research Centre analysing socio-cultural change. Its research projects cover quantitative (longitudinal survey analysis) and qualitative (ethnography, interviewing, audio and visual data).

Three interesting issues emerged from our meeting that create interesting areas to consider. First, data collection is not central to its mission. Outside of qualitative work, their projects tend to generate data from existing data; this produces a lot of "derived" data. This led to an ongoing discussion on the question of what counts as data.

The second issue was that the organisational attitude within CRESC is that it is project governed. This is a reflection of the nature of the centre in working across different disciplines with different research norms and values.

Finally, there is CRESC's own interest in the theme of the "social life of methods". This looks at how methods are themselves an agent of social change. An interest was expressed in following our project closely; effectively studying us. Interesting.