Research and Theory as Grounded Social Practice

Abstract

When I started out as a sociology PhD candidate, a great deal of effort went into understanding and maintaining some binary conceptual categories. These include: What is theory? What is research? What are the distinctions between doing youthwork with young people and doing research fieldwork with young people? I knew then that it was important to break from doing things with young people and their communities in order to claim some space to think about what I was seeing, and to put a language around it that made more sense. However, a significant part of doing a project of this type — of ‘growing up’ as a sociologist and researcher — has been a growing awareness of the integrity of the whole, and the interrelatedness of all of these levels of engagement. To be effective, work with young people at a state and community level needs to be based upon coherent sets of assumptions and theoretical frameworks, about such topics as young people’s wellbeing, learning and citizenship. These things in turn depend upon understandings about what is happening to our communities in the face of social change, to rural places, the phenomenon of ‘youth’, and the kinds of transitions that they are negotiating in contemporary societies. If it is going to be well targeted, both policy and community-based practice also need to be based upon grounded research.