Full Description
This multidisciplinary volume demonstrates how Freedom of Information (FOI) law and processes can contribute to social science research design across sociology, criminology, political science, anthropology, journalism and education. Comparing the use of FOI in research design across the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Canada and South Africa, it provides readers with resources to carry out FOI requests and considers the influence such requests can have on debates within multiple disciplines. In addition to exploring how scholars can use FOI disclosures in conjunction with interview data, archival data and other datasets, this collection explains how researchers can systematically analyse FOI disclosures. Considering the challenges and dilemmas in using FOI 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 FOI requests.
Contents
Foreword: Thinking About Access Introduction: Freedom of Information and Research Design in International Perspective Part 1: Freedom of Information and Research Design: The Foundations 1. Designing Research Using FOI Requests in the USA 2. Accessing Information in South Africa 3. UK Experience of Freedom of Information as a Method of Enquiry 4. Using FOI to Explore Governance and Decision-Making in the UK Part 2: Freedom of Information and Research Design: Disciplinary Applications 5. Freedom of Information and Australian Criminology 6. Accessing Information in a Technology Industry: Tracing Canadian Drone Stakeholders and Negotiating Access 7. Using Continuous FOI Requests to Uncover the Live Archive: Tracking Protest Policing in the USA Part 3: Freedom of Information: Triangulation, Data Analysis and Exposition 8. Piecing it Together, Studying Public-Private Partnerships: Freedom of Information as Oligoptic Technologies 9. Researching the Complexities of Knowledge Contestations and Occupational Disease Recognition: FOI Requests in Multi-Method Qualitative Research Design 10. Repertoires of Empirical Social Science and Freedom of Information Requests: Four Techniques for Analyzing Disclosures Part 4: Freedom of Information and Research Design: Challenges and Dilemmas 11. Analysing Public Policy in the UK: Seeing through the Secrecy, Obfuscation and Obstruction of the FOIA by the Home Office 12. A Double-Edged Sword? Freedom of Information as a Method in Social Research 13. The Falling Currency of Democracy: Information as an Instrument of Control and Certainty in the Postwar and Post-Truth Eras Postscript: Access in the Absence of FOI: Open Source Investigations and Strategies of Verification
