1
CHAPTER 1
Methodological Issues in Social Research:
Experience from the Twenty-First Century
Nasir Uddin
1.1 PRIMER
The methodology of social research has been transformed along with the meta-
morphosis of the socio-economic and political rhetoric and the reality across
the globe. Because of its various experience and experiments depending on the
subjects, contexts and regions, social research methodology itself has become
an issue of research in the twenty-frst century. The feldwork challenges vary
from discipline to discipline and from region to region because every discipline
in social sciences, despite having some identical broader frameworks, has its
distinctive tone of interpretation and every region has its own social, political,
historical and ecological settings. Social research involves the researcher’s
engagement, interpersonal attachment, and impersonal affection in dealing
with persons; the object of study (See, Uddin, 2011). Since social research and
its methodologies tend to change and evolve from time to time, new and newer
feldwork experiences are needed to reformulate the model and module of
social research methods and methodologies. Hence, a new form of methodol-
ogy could be framed that refects the researcher’s personal, political, social,
cultural and emotional holdings being developed and formed throughout the
researcher’s socialization and socio-cultural upbringing across time and
space (See, Uddin, 2022). Consequently, social research is not simply a typical
‘academic practice’ that follows an innocent ‘professional genre’ and ‘research
rituals’; rather it heavily entangles with the researcher’s lived experiences of
N. Uddin (*)
Department of Anthropology, University of Chittagong, Chittagong, Bangladesh
e-mail: nasir.anthro@cu.ac.bd
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2023
N. Uddin, A. Paul (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Social Fieldwork,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13615-3_1