Social research methods

Описание мероприятия

Описание программы

Social research methods is a technical subject that has its own language and this language must be used in a very precise way. This course will describe the key components of social research, allow students to develop skills and knowledge about quantitative and qualitative social research and identify criteria used to evaluate the quality of social research.

This course is designed to:

• describe the key components of social research
• develop skills and knowledge about quantitative and qualitative social research
• identify criteria used to evaluate the quality of social research

Assessment

This course is assessed by a three-hour unseen written examination.

Учебный план:

The contexts of social research: Social research as a professional activity. The market for social research outputs. The contexts of data collection. Social research and academic sociology. Philosophy and the practice of social research. The cultural context and ethnocentrism. Developing research proposals in context.

Models and Modelling in Social Research: Ontological and epistemological status of models. Models and researchable questions. Exploratory and Confirmatory approaches to model building. Flexibility in Research Design. The use of models in quantitative and qualitative social research

Concepts in Social Research: Approaches to concept formation in Sociology. Theory and concepts. Induction and deduction. The use of concepts in qualitative and quantitative social research. Coding qualitative data. Operationalising concepts. Complex concepts: property spaces.

Qualitative Social Research: Sources of qualitative data: the interview, focus groups, participant observation and field work methods, documents. Sampling in qualitative social research: grounded theory and theoretical sampling. Analytic induction and qualitative classification analysis. Small N research and case studies: ‘thick’ description.

Quantitative Social Research: Sources of quantitative data: the social survey, administrative and official statistics. Secondary analysis of survey data. Designing social surveys. Quasiexperimental designs. Units and levels of analysis. Graphics and visualising data. Explanation and causal inference.

Deciphering and Evaluating Social Research Outputs: The components of a social research publication. Identifying components. Reconstructing the research project. Validity in quantitative and qualitative research.

Результат обучения:

At the end of this course and having completed the essential reading and activities students should be able to:

• formulate researchable questions
• define a research strategy and design a research project to answer a research question
• discuss the practice and principles of qualitative and quantitative social research
• use skills and knowledge acquired in the course to evaluate the quality of published research by sociologists and other social scientists.

Требования к поступающим:

If taken as part of a BSc degree, courses which must be passed before this course may be attempted:

• SC1178 Contemporary sociology in a global age or
• SC1021 Principles of sociology