Editorial Board

Nigel Fielding

Nigel Fielding grew up in the United States of America but returned to Great Britain for his university education, where he took an undergraduate degree in Sociology at the University of Sussex and a Masters degree in Sociology at the University of Kent. He then lectured at Hendon Police College. His doctoral research was the first study carried out on the National Front, an extreme Right, racialist political party. The study was based on covert participant observation. Nigel Fielding then taught in the School of Law at Ealing College of Higher Education and the Department of Social Administration at the LSE. In 1978 he joined the University of Surrey as a lecturer in criminology. He was promoted to a personal Chair in Sociology in 1995. From 1985 to 1998 he was editor of the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice and a member of the Council of the Howard League for Penal Reform.

Nigel Fielding's principal research interests are in policing, qualitative methods and new technologies for social research. Amongst his publications are a dozen books, including The National Front (1981), Joining forces (1988), a study of police training, The police and social conflict (1991), a social audit of policing, Using computers in qualitative research (1991), Investigating child sexual abuse (1992), a study of joint investigations involving police and social services, Negotiating nothing (1992), a study of police tactics in disputes, Community policing (1995), a study of the conditions necessary for successful community policing, and Computer Analysis and Qualitative Research (1998), which draws on the first field research in the world on how researchers actually use qualitative software.

Nigel Fielding has been a consultant to the Police Training Council, police forces and probation services, the Home Office, the UK government inquiry into the future of the police service, and the independent Police Foundation inquiry into the same subject. He is a consultant to a number of UK and US publishers in the field of qualitative methods. He is a member of the editorial boards of Qualitative Inquiry, The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice and Sociological Research Online. He is currently co-Director of the CAQDAS (Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data AnalysiS) Networking Project, the UK's national centre for qualitative software, which is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council. Along with Ray Lee, he is co-Editor of the New Technologies for Social Research book series (Sage Publications). Nigel Fielding was Deputy Dean of Human Studies at the University of Surrey for a number of years, and is now co-Director of the Institute of Social Research at the University of Surrey and Chair of the Research Committee of the School of Human Sciences.

Nigel Fielding's partner is Dr Jane Fielding, who is Lecturer in Quantitative Sociology at the University of Surrey. They have a daughter, Jessica, who is currently in secondary school. Nigel's personal interests include reading biographies (especially political biographies), visiting ancient and classical archaeological sites, swimming, snorkel diving, photography, and allotment gardening ('allotments' are small plots of land owned by local councils in the UK and rented for a small sum to people who like growing their own vegetables and fruit).

Main research fields:

Among Nigel Fielding's research interests in qualitative methods are the ethics and politics of qualitative research, the status of covert participant observation, qualitative software, and the interrelationship of qualitative and quantitative methods. For several years he has devoted most of his writing and research in the methodology field to topics relating to qualitative software. He convened the first conference in the world on qualitative software in 1989, and co-edited a book based on the conference papers which went on to become an academic bestseller (Using Computers in Qualitative Research, Sage 1991, 2/e 1993). More recently, he has developed an interest in the secondary analysis of qualitative data, and during 1999 he carried out, with Jane Fielding, a pilot study to assess the value of re-analysis of archived data, using archived data from a famous British prison study of the 1960s. His interest was kindled by the investment the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is making in archiving of qualitative data, in the form of the Qualidata Archival Resource Centre. Another recent interest arose from his membership of an ESRC consultative group on the implications for social research of the new European data protection legislation. The implications of the new law could fundamentally alter the practice of qualitative fieldwork, a fact ignored by Europe's legislators but identified by the British government as a serious concern.

In criminology and policing, Nigel Fielding's main current writing project is an edited book on economic aspects of crime and criminal justice. In qualitative methods, his main current writing project is a collaboration with Gary Shank (Duquesne University, USA), a semiotician with whom Nigel is writing a paper on 'false equivalence' and abductive inference in field research.

Published in FQS:

• Nigel Fielding (2005). The Resurgence, Legitimation and Institutionalization of Qualitative Methods. FQS 6(2)

• Nigel Fielding & Margrit Schreier (2001). Introduction: On the Compatibility between Qualitative and Quantitative Research Methods. FQS 2(1)

• Nigel Fielding & Margrit Schreier (Eds.) (2001). Qualitative and Quantitative Research: Conjunctions and Divergences. FQS 2(1)

• Nigel Fielding (2000). The Shared Fate of Two Innovations in Qualitative Methodology: The Relationship of Qualitative Software and Secondary Analysis of Archived Qualitative Data. FQS 1(3)

Contact:

Prof. Nigel Fielding

Institute of Social Research
Department of Sociology
University of Surrey
Guildford GU2 5XH
England

Phone: + 44 / 1483 876967
Fax: + 44 / 1483 259551

E-mail: n.fielding@surrey.ac.uk
URL: http://www.soc.surrey.ac.uk/nigel_fielding.htm

[qualitative-research.net] [Home] [Inside FQS] [Features] [Services] [Submission]
[FAQ] [Advertising] [Search FQS] [Newsletter] [Editorial Team]

© 1999-2008 Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research
(ISSN 1438-5627)

Supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Center für Digitale Systeme, Freie Universität Berlin