Uncertainties in a time of changing research practices

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic wrought uncertainty into everyday life in abrupt and dynamic ways. State, regional, community and institutional responses to the spread of COVID-19 across the globe had profound and immediate implications for the conduct of social research. Measures like physical distancing, travel and movement restrictions, and face-mask mandates disrupted many widespread social research practices such that researchers in many disciplines found they were having to rethink their plans. Initially, conventional face-to-face interviews were out, as were most physically co-present forms of data generation as people and organisations found the risks too high. Shifts to online data generation or using secondary data were attractive, but these were not universally available or appropriate. In the subsequent months and years as COVID-19 has moved differently through populations, regions and countries, with different approaches to governance and containment, physical and organisational restrictions have come and gone and social research methods and methodologies have been continually affected. Concerns about research project life courses have waxed and waned as the potential for lockdowns and other restrictions have risen and fallen with the cyclical spread of the virus. The ongoing uncertainties with respect to COVID-19 include knowing about the biological and infective behaviour of the virus; the dynamism in this means that societal, organisational and governmental responses continue to be unpredictable as models and systems are also in high states of flux (Pearce, 2020). In other words, un/certainties were, and arguably still are, having a more significant impact on how we live and how we research. However, as contributions to this special issue show, COVID-19 is just one dimension of many intersecting phenomena that distribute uncertainties unevenly through populations and research method practices. We, the editors working in the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM), were funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to perform a rapid evidence review and organise research community workshops to synthesise the growing literature and share learning with respect to the solutions emerging in methodological adaptations in response to the pandemic. Through three phases of the project, running from August 2020 to June 2022, we ran 14 online workshops, led two webinars, wrote-up two rapid evidence reviews and published a range of other methodological resources (see https://www.ncrm.ac.uk/research/socscicovid19/). Throughout the project, uncertainty was a crucial theme to the extent that we decided that the final workshops, which we ran with a small cohort of engaged researchers from charity, academic and industry sectors, should be dedicated to exploring and discussing uncertainty. In that final series of three half-day workshops, we asked, ‘how productive is uncertainty for research methods?’ At the same time, we began inviting submissions for this special issue on uncertainty and research methods which reflects on the same question, and which we intend as a provocation to frame further discussions. We identified some potential contributors through our earlier rapid evidence review processes and approached them directly. We also advertised the call for papers for the special issue through the journal and other channels, including through NCRM and participants in our workshops. Contributions, therefore, came in through different routes. The special issue represents a collective and collaborative endeavour to consider different aspects of uncertainty in social research, with writers from a range of backgrounds and disciplinary traditions commenting on their experiences and thoughts on uncertainty and research process in INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIAL RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 2023, VOL. 26, NO. 5, 507–513 https://doi.org/10.1080/13645579.2023.2173421