Sociology Editing and Proofreading Services

Neighbourhood disadvantage is associated with lower educational attainment, net of household income, parental education and school quality. The coefficient is stable, the model is well specified, and the paper has established that something about neighbourhoods matters. It has not said what, and every policy implication in the discussion depends on the answer.

We edit what sociologists write — quantitative papers using survey and administrative data, ethnographic and interview-based research, mixed methods studies, social stratification and mobility work, family, work and organisational sociology, theoretical and conceptual articles, reports for agencies and third sector bodies, and theses, articles and grant applications. Our editors work on the mechanism between the variables.

The mechanism is what makes a sociological finding an explanation rather than a pattern, and the failure is a robust association with the process left unstated. Explaining how one thing produces another is the discipline's central task and the hardest part of the writing. We work through these so the proposed mechanism is stated as a process with actors doing things, since "social capital" and "cultural reproduction" are labels for mechanisms and not mechanisms themselves; so the observable implications of the mechanism are named, because a proposed process that predicts nothing beyond the association it was invented to explain adds nothing; so rival mechanisms consistent with the same association are set out and, where possible, distinguished by evidence rather than by preference; so the level at which the mechanism operates is specified — individual, household, network, institution or neighbourhood — as a mechanism stated at the wrong level cannot be tested; so qualitative evidence is used to show the process where the quantitative work can only show the pattern; so selection is addressed as a rival account rather than acknowledged; and so the paper states what evidence would show the mechanism is wrong. Papers written this way explain rather than describe.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including unpublished analyses, fieldwork material and participant information. We are editors rather than sociologists, and we offer no view on theory, mechanisms or findings. What we can do is bring the process between the variables onto the page.