Profile

Emma is a sociologist with a background in qualitative policy analysis, research and teaching. As a director of the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships and the Binks Hub, she is passionate about sharing expertise in qualitative research methods through teaching and knowledge exchange. Emma’s substantive research is concerned with the relationship between macro socio-economic structures and the subjective, micro-personal. She is a methodologist with expertise in qualitative research, creative and participatory approaches, and working with large volumes of qualitative data. With colleagues, she pioneered the breadth-and-depth method of analysis and co-founded the Big Qual Analysis Resource Hub (http://bigqlr.ncrm.ac.uk/). 

Emma has also led a Leverhulme Trust fellowship on the everyday social world of the public library and the challenges faced under austerity. Her publications included Big Qual: A Guide to Breadth-and-Depth Analysis (Palgrave, 2023), as well as various academic articles in Social Policy & Society, Social Policy Review, Scottish Affairs, Social Inclusion, Sociological Research Online and Quality and Quantity.