ABSTRACT
This chapter explains why one may wish to interrogate a research question via socio-legal means, and provides a structured way to go about socio-legal empirical research project. It discusses socio-legal empirical projects rather than to be a comprehensive account of how to complete socio-legal research. The chapter examines whether people may wish to make use of a hypothesis or hypotheses to guide their method selection and the ways in which people test their findings. Socio-legal research is the examination of how law, legal phenomena and/or phenomena affected by law and the legal system occur in the world, interact with each other and impact upon those who are touched by them. Academics often tell their postgraduate students that they should undertake a literature review and rarely explain what one is. A theoretical framework is an ideological or practical lens that holds certain things to be foundational as an explanation for how the world works.
