Foreword: Inertia and innovation in inter-disciplinary social science By Paul Webley (School of Oriental and African Studies)

Social scientists use a wide variety of methods and analytical techniques, with some focusing on the individual, others on very small groups, and still others on huge samples of the population. So an interested general reader dipping into social scientific research might encounter transcripts of conversations analysed with great subtlety, experiments carried out in computer laboratories or complex statistical analysis of survey data. Disciplines within social science have different traditions and different epistemologies, so the neophyte researcher is exposed to and trained in very different kinds of approaches depending on whether they are a social anthropologist, a geographer, an economist, demographer, psychologist or sociologist. The research questions they seek to answer, however, very often cross disciplinary boundaries, so there is a danger that disciplinary affiliation can act as a straightjacket, which can constrain the choice of research method and restrict an appreciation of relevant research carried out by those in other disciplines. For most of my academic career I have been working in economic psychology, and trying to ensure that my work both draws on and feeds back to the two parent disciplines of economics and psychology (Webley et al 2001). In terms of methods, this has presented serious problems. Psychologists base much of their research on what people 'say ' – in one-to-one interviews, focu