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While the concept of legal culture has been receiving a growing attention from scholars, this research often overemphasizes the similarity of the opinions held by different segments of population. Furthermore, the relationship of migration and the change of legal-cultural attitudes has not received particular attention. Drawing on 70 in-depth interviews with the immigrants of the early 1990s from the former Soviet Union to Israel and the secular Israeli Jews, this chapter provides a comprehensive account of the various aspects of legal culture of these groups. The second important finding is the persistence of the legal-cultural attitudes and perceptions over time.

Purpose – The purpose of the chapter is to introduce interviewing as an exploratory research approach for understanding the lived experiences of individuals and groups in sports and physical cultural contexts. The author draws on her own research with snowboarders to illustrate some of the standard and unique issues related to conducting interviews as part of ethnographic fieldwork.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter begins with a brief history of the development of qualitative interviews and their various uses in sport studies. The author then provides a description of her use of ‘postmodern-inspired’ interviews as part of a broader ethnographic study of snowboarding culture. Following this, she adopts an alternative representational approach to illustrate some of the practical, ethical, political and embodied issues for reflexive researchers working in the critical paradigm and conducting interviews in sport and physical cultural fields.

Findings – The chapter illustrates the value of a postmodern approach to interviewing that recognises the interview as more than textual, and gives greater consideration to the affective, sensuous, relational, embodied and socio-spatial dimensions of each interview event.

Research limitations/implications – The chapter examines the strengths and limitations of qualitative interviewing, with particular attention to the potential and perils of interviewing in the sports field.

Originality/value – The chapter provides a succinct introduction to the use of interviewing in sport and physical culture, and makes an innovative contribution by focusing on ethnographic interviews.

How do researchers capture children's and adolescents’ cultures and peer interactions? Ethnography, as argued by several sociologists including Corsaro (1996), is indeed a valuable method for understanding everyday life. However, what about issues that are sensitive? What about issues that are salient in the lives of children and adolescents, yet are not talked about in settings generally accessible to researchers such as schools, youth groups, community centers, and extracurricular programs? Family issues such as divorce, for example, might be highly salient in a child's life, yet not talked about during school lunch in front of an adult researcher. Children talk with their friends and peers about divorce, share stories and experiences with divorce, and interpret the meanings of divorce in groups.

During a site-based certification program in a large county school district in the southeastern United States, 14 educators took 7 graduate courses on teaching emergent bilinguals. These educators made a shift in their practices and perceived a corresponding shift in their teaching efficacy. Ten years after the onset of this program, researchers returned to the site and conducted a mixed-methods study. The first purpose of this study was to explore educators’ perceptions regarding instructional practices for teaching emergent bilinguals after a decade had passed. The second purpose was to identify course features perceived by educators as having been most instrumental in fostering a long-term transformation in their teaching practices. Data were collected from a survey and interviews with the 14 educators (13 teachers and a program specialist) who had completed this certification program. Results indicated changes in their teaching methods and interactions with parents as well as heightened confidence for taking on leadership roles. Study participants identified professional learning communities, cyclical reflective activities, and action research projects as the course features that had been instrumental in transforming their practices for working with emergent bilinguals. Findings suggest that this site-based certification program was a catalyst for generating individual change that continued beyond program completion. By exploring this decade-long transformation, the current study provides implications for designing and implementing graduate certification courses that prepare in-service teachers to work effectively with emergent bilinguals.

Protests surrounding the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC) resulted in over 1,800 arrests. Scholarship on repression is divided about the likely impacts of arrests on subsequent activism. Interviews with RNC arrestees are used to examine potential effects. Findings offer twists to social movements and socio-legal hypotheses: (1) while many arrestees were less willing to protest after their arrest, for many of these individuals deterrence was selective, not wholesale; (2) many factors that were expected to neutralize repressive impacts either resulted in deterrence or set the stage for radicalization; and (3) individuals who were radicalized shared strong preparation for their arrest experience.

With the so-called greying of many nations, ageing is becoming a critical issue for social and urban policy (Polivka & Longino, 2004). While populations may be ageing chronologically in many countries, notions of ageing and ‘the elderly’ are shifting – influenced by economic, political and cultural changes. People are living longer, and are living more diverse and flexible lives. The shape of their lives is changing in relation to factors such as government policy, the economy, leisure and work practice, and the giving and receiving of care (OECD, 1996). Such changes pose challenges for policy makers as these societal shifts have both social and spatial consequences. ‘Ageing’ is consequently a concept which needs unpacking in order to make informed decisions about planning and public policy – to understand how the concept of age is shaped, negotiated and experienced differentially in place (Williams & Ylanne-McEwen, 2000). This chapter shows how the personal stories and experiences of older individuals form narratives which can both shape and challenge policy makers’ views of ageing and place relationships.

This chapter focusses on how qualitative research can capture the lived experiences of entrepreneurial individuals by exploring their subjective experiences. Traditional methods of data collection involve listening to what entrepreneurial individuals say and observing their actions, although particular attention to their feelings is often absent. To achieve data congruence and to gain a deeper understanding of their lived experiences, it is crucial to also take into consideration how they feel. This chapter will recount a confessional tale recorded during a recent field study in entrepreneurship that will shed light on the pivotal role that a researcher’s sensory processing sensitivity (SPS) trait can play during qualitative data collection in helping researchers becoming mindful of the feelings of entrepreneurial individuals, even when those feelings are not directly expressed by them. The introduction of the researcher’s SPS trait in promoting data congruence during qualitative data collection will be this chapter’s principal contribution.

This chapter highlights the value offered by photographic research methods to the study of organizational compassion. We demonstrate this potential by first briefly reviewing the history and usage of photographic research methods in the social sciences and the state of compassion research. We then describe how compassion emerged as a key theme in a field study that utilized photographic methods. From this, we identify four approaches that photographic research methods can be used to extend our understanding of compassion in organizations. Specifically, we clarify how this stream of research can be enhanced by the inclusion of photographic methods. We highlight critical research decisions and possible concerns in implementing photographic methods. The chapter concludes with additional organizational phenomena that would benefit from using a photographic methods approach.

The various methods gathered under the umbrella label of qualitative (Guba & Lincoln, 1994), defined as the study of “things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005, p. 3), offer many benefits through their ability to access, explore, and experience real organizational people and problems in rich detail (Van Maanen, 1979). As an example, photographic research methods—primarily qualitative methods through which researchers use photographs to elicit information during interviews and focus groups—often result in deep and nuanced data (Collier & Collier, 1986; Harper, 2005; Vince & Warren, 2012). Photographic methodologies are well-suited to the exploration of new phenomena because they allow researchers to get close to the lived experience and organizational processes (Dion, 2007), attend simultaneously to the social and material world in organizations (Shortt & Warren, 2012), and offer the potential to “mine deeper shafts into a different part of human consciousness than do words-alone interviews” (Harper, 2002, p. 23). Organizational research has traditionally been dominated by a positivistic paradigm that focuses on theory evaluation through the use of quantitative methodologies (Lin, 1998; Sutton, 1997), whereas qualitative research offers the potential to build theory by illuminating underlying processes and causal mechanisms in specific contexts (Lee, 1999). Researchers developing theory may be particularly interested in the richness of the data gathered with qualitative methods (Edmondson & McManus, 2007) such as photographic methods. Qualitative research is thus well-matched to nascent literatures that require inductive study about a phenomenon to generate foundational knowledge (Edmondson & McManus, 2007).

One such nascent research stream that could benefit from photographic methodologies is organizational compassion (Rynes, Bartunek, Dutton, & Margolis, 2012). In its current state, compassion research within the organizational literature has generated many narratives of experiences of compassion in response to a specific tragedy (Dutton, Worline, Frost, & Lilius, 2006), as an organizational capability (Lilius et al., 2011b), or as an organizational capacity that an organization can develop (Madden, Duchon, Madden, & Plowman, 2012). These stories demonstrate that the common elements of the compassion process are the noticing of someone else's pain, empathizing with that person, and then responding in a way designed to lessen that pain (Kanov et al., 2004); however, because this process is so individualized, photographic methodologies offer researchers a chance to capture valuable new information about this process and the experience of compassion within organizations. In this chapter, we describe many potential benefits of designing organizational compassion research based on photographic methodologies.

In doing so, we offer several contributions. First, we show how photographic methodologies can create deeper responses during interviews and observations that may lead to surprising insights for theory. Second, by suggesting some of the insights that have been generated about compassion through photographic methodologies, we offer novel research ideas for this growing body of literature. The following sections provide background on the development and history of photographic methodologies and review the studies and methodologies that have contributed to our understanding of compassion within organizations. Subsequently, we describe some of the ways in which compassion has surfaced during our own field study using photograph elicitation. Finally, we describe possible studies that could benefit from the use of four forms of photographic methodologies to explore more targeted research questions related to organizational compassion and also offer a range of other organizational phenomena that could benefit from a photographic methods approach.