The Centre for Social Issues Research is an interdisciplinary collaborative research group housed within the University of Limerick Faculty of Education and Health Science.

The group develops research ideas and supports collaborations to address contemporary social issues, supporting collaborations between skilled researchers at all career stages and external agencies in a partnership approach.

The unifying aim of the Centre for Social Issues Research (CSI-R) is to promote theoretically informed and methodologically sound innovative social research that addresses contemporary social issues and informs social policy.

The core feature of our work is an appreciation that all behaviour, educational, health, occupational and social actions, are shaped by systems and structures as much as individual psychologies. 

We see ourselves as working in partnership with community, service and statutory sectors. Rather than having beneficiaries therefore we take an action-research orientation best exemplified by the mantra ‘nothing about us without us’.  This results in the research being informed, owned and used by our partners for purposes as they see fit. 

We have experience and expertise in collaboratively designing projects, developing funding proposals and carrying out research and interventions with partners. For example, the Irish Research Council offers the Enterprise Partnership Scheme that funds a researcher (PhD candidate) to work with a non-academic partner (e.g. an SME, NGO, or public sector agency). The partner contributes a portion of the cost of the scholarship but accesses extensive research expertise for a relatively modest investment.