Research Strategy and Themes

The distinctiveness of the CQR programme concerns the pursuit of knowledge and evidence grounded in peoples’ everyday experiences. Our programme can be characterised as: ‘Leading care through new ways of accessing, understanding and using knowledge from people’s experiences’. It includes contributions to epistemological, ontological and methodological concerns that can support such knowledge.    There is clear overlap and compatibility between the aims of the CQR and other Centres and Groups. Our coherent rationale and focus allows us to pursue collaborative projects with other Centres, groups and  Schools within the university, as well as national and international partners, where our agendas overlap.

Qualitative research has reached a new ‘turn’ that is not primarily methodological for  its own sake, but which is outward-facing in a particular way: to focus on research, enterprise, knowledge transfer, teaching and mentorship that provides knowledge and practices that can humanise care contexts. This requires a scholarship agenda that:

• develops theory that articulates the need for humanising care contexts in policy and practice. This includes theory about the synergy of the arts and sciences in relation to the humanisation of care, the political and practice implications of ‘lifeworld-led care’, the ethics of care, and distinctive theories of well-being and quality of life that are humanising and cut across traditional diagnostic boundaries;
• develops methodological innovations for making qualitative research more relevant to practice in a way that humanises care. Such methodological innovations include: phenomenological methods for studying well-being and quality of life across diagnostic categories; developing performative social science approaches for both the investigation of, and dissemination of data, contributing to a step-change in the ways in which qualitative research findings are disseminated; specific contributions to the translation and application of qualitative research findings such as ‘embodied interpretation’, lifeworld-led education, cut-up technique, and novel participative strategies for engaging and interacting with people for whom the research is about, We also offer expertise in a wide range of other qualitative research approaches such as ethnography, biographical method, grounded theory, narrative analysis and mindful approaches to research and care;
  
  
• develop specific topic areas. Applies such theory and methodological innovations to topic areas that are relevant to the humanisation of care contexts. This includes:
• living with technology;
• living well into old age;
• older Gays and Lesbians living in rural settings;
• living with challenging conditions such as phantom pain, illness-related fatigue, and other ‘grey’ areas that sometimes gets lost in the cracks of ‘care priorities’;
• the use of the arts and humanities in health care education and practice
• collaborative projects with others in which our theoretical and methodological contributions can make a helpful difference.

• Humanising Health and Social Care
• Novel and Innovative Research Methodologies
• Performative Social Science

• Projects