Dr Samantha Stone
BA Hons, MRes, PhD
Expertise
Extensive experience in ethnographic research across health and education. Skilled in longitudinal fieldwork, in-depth interviews, public involvement, and creating outputs for academic and public audiences.
Current positions
Senior Research Associate (Ethnography)
Bristol Medical School (THS)
Contact
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Biography
Building on this foundation, I transitioned into health research, where I developed a strong interest in chronic pain as a complex, multilayered biopsychosocial phenomenon. At the University of Bristol, my work examines how social phenomena, such as relationships, lifestyles, leisure activities, and occupations, shape transitions into and out of chronic pain. To capture these dynamics, I employed immersive ethnographic methods, including longitudinal fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and visual approaches, engaging closely with participants and their social circles over a 12-month period.
Alongside research, I have developed expertise in managing large qualitative datasets, designing ethically robust studies, and producing outputs for both academic and public audiences. My teaching and supervision experience further strengthened my ability to communicate complex ideas and support methodological development. These experiences have shaped my commitment to collaborative, interdisciplinary research that amplifies participant voices and informs practice in health and social care.
Research interests
Sam is a Senior Research Associate in Ethnography, based within a multidisciplinary research team that is funded by an MRC/Versus Arthritis grant, the Advanced Pain Discovery Platform’s Consortium to research individual, interpersonal and social influences in Pain (CRIISP). The ethnographic research will identify and characterise psychosocial aspects of living with long-term chronic pain. More specifically, Sam will examine how people living with pain experience life and social transitions, how their social and physical environments impact on their pain and the ways in which they are able to influence those environments. She is concerned with direct and indirect effects of the wider social and health context on pain, including socioeconomic position; social embeddedness or isolation; living conditions; and occupation.
Sam’s PhD (2020, University of Bath) and MRes (2015, University of Bath) were both in Education and funded by the Economic Social Research Council (ESRC). Her ethnographic doctoral research explores children’s school mealtime socialisation from a child-centred perspective. She examined carnivalesque features of school mealtime events, drawing on contextually situated analyses of children’s subversion of school mealtime social order. Drawing on Bakhtin (1968; 1991), Goffman (1975), and Sociocultural theorising she examined the dialogic space of children’s socialisation to understand how they are open, active and creative processes of interdependence and experimentation with contradiction between the self and the other. Sam is passionate about giving voice to children, co-creating and co-producing knowledge that facilitates a more equal relationship between the researcher and participants to enable two-way conversations.
Publications
Recent publications
10/07/2025Social influences in the experience of transition to or from long-term (chronic) pain
PLOS ONE
‘I like it when I can sit with my best friends’: Exploration of children’s agency to achieve commensality in school mealtimes
Food Futures in Education and Society
Children’s commensality: Participation and footing shifts in school mealtime interactions
Children’s Geographies
The establishment, maintenance, and adaptation of high and low impact chronic pain:
Pain
Children's humour and the grotesque pleasures in school mealtime socialisation
Children & Society
