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.
Table of Contents
Foreword: Thinking About Access
Ben Worthy
Introduction: Freedom of Information and Research Design in International Perspective
Kevin Walby and Alex Luscombe
Part 1: Freedom of Information and Research Design: The Foundations
1. Designing Research Using FOI Requests in the USA
Emily J.M. Knox, Shannon M. Oltmann, and Chris Peterson
2. Accessing Information in South Africa
Toerien van Wyk
3. UK Experience of Freedom of Information as a Method of Enquiry
Keith Spiller and Andrew Whiting
4. Using FOI to Explore Governance and Decision-Making in the UK
Mike Sheaff
Part 2: Freedom of Information and Research Design: Disciplinary Applications
5. Freedom of Information and Australian Criminology
Ian Warren
6. Accessing Information in a Technology Industry: Tracing Canadian Drone Stakeholders and Negotiating Access
Ciara Bracken-Roche
7. Using Continuous FOI Requests to Uncover the Live Archive: Tracking Protest Policing in the USA
Pierce Greenberg
Part 3: Freedom of Information: Triangulation, Data Analysis and Exposition
8. Piecing it Together, Studying Public-Private Partnerships: Freedom of Information as Oligoptic Technologies
Debra Mackinnon
9. Researching the Complexities of Knowledge Contestations and Occupational Disease Recognition: FOI Requests in Multi-Method Qualitative Research Design
Christine Pich
10. Repertoires of Empirical Social Science and Freedom of Information Requests: Four Techniques for Analyzing Disclosures
Kevin Walby and Alex Luscombe
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
John R Campbell
12. A Double-Edged Sword? Freedom of Information as a Method in Social Research
Hannah Bows
13. The Falling Currency of Democracy: Information as an Instrument of Control and Certainty in the Postwar and Post-Truth Eras
Sean Holman
Postscript: Access in the Absence of FOI: Open Source Investigations and Strategies of Verification
Giancarlo Fiorella
