Life and Thought
Tim May is a British sociologist who works on social theory, the methodology of social research and reflexivity. His textbook Social Research: Issues, Methods and Process is a well-known teaching resource on research methods in the social sciences.
Tim May is a British sociologist whose research and teaching centre on social theory, the philosophy of the social sciences and the methodology of social research. The sources available for this text give no reliable information about his date of birth or the details of his personal and educational life, so these matters are left out of this biography.
His best-known work is Social Research: Issues, Methods and Process, which is used to teach research methods in the social sciences and has gone through several editions. In it he examines research methods together with their philosophical and theoretical assumptions, and does not treat them as merely technical. His Situating Social Theory likewise examines social theory in its historical and intellectual context.
In recent years, especially with Beth Perry, he has worked on reflexivity in social research and has written Social Research and Reflexivity and Reflexivity: The Essential Guide. The central point of these works is that researchers must question their own position, assumptions and institutional and social setting.
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