Päivi Honkatukia

Focus groups and the study of violence

The article examines the focus group method as a tool to study violence in youth residential care based on an empirical study of 38 young people in two Finnish reform schools. The key issue here is to reflect upon the processes of knowledge production as we trace the ways in which the institutional and situational context and the very form of focus groups affect the ways of talking about violence. Special attention is given to strong and weak themes in the focus group interviews.

Sensitive Issues in Vulnerable Conditions: Studying Violence in Youth Residential Care

This article discusses the experiences of the ethical dilemmas encountered in a research project on teenage reformatory school residents’ understanding of violence.The study is based on group interviews of teenage youth (15 interview sessions) in two Finnish reformatory schools.The agenda for the interviews dealt with the adolescents’views on violence, experiences of it in different contexts such as home, school and residential care, as well as their moral judgement of it. The study has been motivated by the growing body of knowledge and concerns about youth violence, linking the experiences of violence, seen as traumatic, with behavioural and psychosocial problems. We would like to contribute to that debate by saying something about violence as defined by young people. Confidentiality and voluntary participation are some of the basic principles guiding the research process.The ethical issues are, however, more complicated.The actual act of asking young people to speak about violence can be (re)traumatizing. On the other hand, it is important to give them a chance to speak. The dilemma of misusing the young people’s participation in the research and the option of giving space for voices to be heard is one of the ethical dilemmas confronted in this paper.

School Violence as a Complex Social Problem: Trends in Managing Discipline in Finnish Educational Policy

In this chapter we will set the historical scene for school violence and behaviour management discourses in Finland, starting from the time of the basic education reforms between 1960 and 1980 to this day. Moreover, we will develop our critical social scientific approach to school violence as a research topic and social problem and apply this methodology to the school context, in order to vision what kind of critical questions one should ask when trying to understand different forms of violence in the school institution. We argue that instead of demonizing aggression and conflicts, there should be pedagogic ways of working with these issues.

Book Review: Unwanted: Muslim Immigrants, Dignity, and Drug Dealing

interpretation (Häussling), the core of this volume is Parts II and III. The chapters on applications (Part II) all draw on significant empirical research projects to illustrate in different ways how mixed methods are being used in social network research. Bernardi and colleagues describe a data collection instrument applied in a comparative project on fertility decisions that combines semi-structured interviews with standardized network data collection tools. One of the benefits from such a parallel data collection design is the simultaneous collection of information on agency and structure. Maya-Jariego and Domı́nguez present a variation of such mixing of psychometrics and interviews, using psychometric network data and interviews to explore personal networks and the individual experience of acculturation. The iterative and sequential approach to data collection and analysis is extended further in Avenarius and Johnson’s study of network positions and beliefs about justice in rural China. They describe an ambitious longitudinal design that uses five instruments to collect data over a three-year period, constructing an increasingly deeper understanding of the role and meaning of social structure in everyday life. Concluding Part II, Gluesing and colleagues show how qualitative interview and observational data are used to validate and contextualize email communication data in a study of innovation networks, thus combining automated quantitative data-mining and ethnographic methods. Where the chapters in Part II teach mixed methods research by example, the chapters in Part III discuss in more detail some selected methodological approaches and how they can be put to use in mixed methods network research. In turn, these four chapters discuss fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (Hollstein and Wagemann), text analysis (Verd and Lozares), visualization (Molina et al.), and agent-based modelling (Rogers and Menjı́var). Part III made less of an impression than Part II, perhaps because there are more comprehensive texts on the market about these topics, perhaps also because a section labelled ‘new approaches’ created higher expectations; that said, all contributions to Part III share valuable and insightful reflections on social network research design and analysis, drawing on rich research experiences. Moreover, the chapter by Molina and colleagues on the use of visualization for collecting and analysing personal network data provides an excellent methodological frame for some of the chapters in Part II. Mixed Methods Social Networks Research details a sophisticated range of network studies and offers valuable lessons from network analysis in the making. I will remark that there is a bias towards small-n data and personal (ego-centric) networks. It would have been nice to also see research focusing on structures of large-n complete networks, moving beyond the (false?) idea that ethnography in some form may be a necessary component of mixed-methods research. However, this remark should not deflate the value of any of the chapters or of the volume as a whole. This volume gives a unique insight into the enormous potential of social network analysis and offers rich examples of how to tackle and solve challenges in research design, offering something for the novice and the experienced researcher alike.