ABSTRACT
This edited collection has presented insights from across the world into the issues facing researchers who actively work with those whose lives reside at the margins of society. The content of the chapters provides a collective insight into the wide-ranging tensions and dilemmas that can emerge when conducting research with young people, prisoners, ethnic minorities and extremists, among others. We are convinced that the issues raised will help to better inform the work of academic scholars who are seeking to research the issues associated with ‘hard to reach’ groups. In putting together this collection, we have been mindful of Noaks and Wincup’s (2004: 152) observation that ‘conducting research is far less straightforward than typically portrayed in research methods texts or the heroic confessional tales of researchers’. The authors in this collection have been open about the numerous methodological, analytical and theoretical dilemmas they have grappled with and the way in which many of these issues have remained unresolved.
