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Privacy is a highly valued ideal in western societies and the researcher is usually expected to protect the privacy of the researched. However, real world fieldwork experiences are highly complex and the researcher can often find their private life encroached upon. The chapter uses the authors’ own field experiences to discuss this complexity. Lee-Treweek focuses upon her research experience with disabled children living in rural England and Bourne-Day on projects with refugee and asylum seekers in Staffordshire, England. Their discussions reveal that more often than not, privacy issues in the field often interconnect researcher and the researched.

In this chapter I provide a sociological discussion of the gender pay gap legalisation by drawing on data in the sport sector across public and private commercial sports organisations. The gender pay gap is a significant reporting tool as it refers to the difference in the average hourly wage of all men compared to all women across an organisation (gov.uk, 2020). It is part of legislation introduced in the UK in 2017 which requires all employers with 250 or more employees to calculate and publish annually their gender pay gap data (gov.uk, 2020). The patterns emerging from the data indicate that the highest disparity in gender pay remains in those organisations where professional sport is commercialised around male performance (average gender pay gap is 59.1% in 2018–2019). In this chapter I draw on figurational concepts of power that enable the analysis of gender relations processually and draw on the role of shame and embarrassment to discuss the ways in which gender pay gap reporting may be used as a power resource to challenge ongoing inequalities in sport governance.

This chapter reviews the conceptual developments in neighbour studies, charting the shift and bringing together older work on the ‘distance-closeness’ dynamic of neighbour relations with newer ‘equality of neighbours’ approaches. It seeks to empirically extend the sociology of neighbours through an analysis of the experiential narratives of neighbours living in contexts of urban multiculture in the United Kingdom. Drawing on two previous studies of urban multicultural social life and a small street study of neighbours in London, this chapter explores the everyday ‘publicness’ of the neighbour and examines the ways in which recent work on social infrastructure can be productively applied to neighbour relations. This chapter concludes that where cultural and social difference is a very ordinary – although not necessarily easy – experience, neighbour relations offer the potential to work as radical sites of pragmatic multiculturalism.

The emergence of gender-nonconforming behavior in a child presents an opportunity and, often, significant pressure for parents to question the gender beliefs they have taken for granted. The purpose of this research is to examine how parents of gender-diverse youth respond to such pressures and ultimately come to understand and support their children’s gender identity.

This research is guided by Ridgeway’s theoretical concept of gender as a primary frame for coordinating social life. Using in-depth interviews with 36 supportive parents of gender-diverse children, the author details the process by which parents developed a critical consciousness of gender and subsequently adopted trans-affirming beliefs in response to their children’s gender-nonconformity.

Findings illustrate the power of gender as a primary frame for organizing life within the family as well as the circumstances under which hegemonic gender beliefs can be disrupted and alternative beliefs can be formed. The analysis shows that the process of making space for gender diversity within the home, which is taken on almost exclusively by mothers, invokes competing maternal mandates of raising “proper” children versus modeling selfless devotion to children’s happiness and well-being. As mothers navigate these conflicting requirements to create greater gender freedom for their children, they reinforce and perpetuate gender stereotypes that cast women as natural caregivers. Ironically, the work of intensive mothering is also the mechanism through which women come to develop alternative gender beliefs that they then use to expand gender possibilities for their children.

Green intentional communities are easily dismissed as irrelevant to wider academic and political debates. In the first instance, they comprise small vanguards, fringes or minority groups. Surely then they interest only the readers of rarefied anthropological journals or viewers of voyeuristic television shows?¹ Secondly, they are part of the green movement, itself often cast (derogatorily,² positively,³ or otherwise⁴ as ‘utopian’). Are they not excessively idealist and romantic: wishful day-dreamers? Drawing on the literal meaning of the word utopia, which combines eu (good), ou (non) and topos (place), this chapter explores the idea that green intentional communities are indeed utopias, whereas challenging two common interpretations of that term. The first views it negatively (as unrealistic, unrealisable, excessively wishful thinking) and can be found on the pages of English Dictionaries and in colloquial parlance. The second views utopias as perfectionist: seeking to provide perfect blueprints that map the road to the good life. I shall explore some of the key ways in which these groups perform key utopian functions, suggesting that they are indeed utopian but that their utopianism is deeply imperfect and pragmatic, rooted in the real concerns and material limitations of the now.

Purpose – Despite the rising number of unmarried and/or divorced parents, negative stereotypes of single parents are still prevalent. The current study aims to explore attitudes toward single mothers (choice vs circumstance) and personal willingness to become single parents in the future.

Design/Methodology/Approach – The current study used a 10-item Likert scale inventory to assess 230 female respondents’ attitudes toward fictitious single mothers; five open-ended questions explored advantages/challenges faced by each mother, and a single-item Likert scale assessed willingness to become a single mother by choice.

Findings – Although young adults (18–25 years) reported more positivity toward single mothers compared to adults (26–79 years), both groups were unwilling to become single mothers by choice. Qualitative findings suggested participants identified more advantages associated with being a single mother by choice (as compared to by circumstance).

Research Limitations/Implications – The majority of the sample consisted of “young adults” (undergraduates) ages 18–25, while the “adult” sample combined multiple generations ages 26–79, resulting in an unbalanced age distribution between groups.

Originality/Value – Few studies have acknowledged the existence of single mothers by choice; the current research provided supporting evidence that attitudes toward single mothers are increasingly more positive among Millennials despite unwillingness to become a single mother by choice in the future.