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Unit of Study SOC30001 - Advanced Social Research (2014)

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Unit Snapshot

  • Enrolment information

    N/A

Unit description

Builds upon knowledge gained in SOC20001 Doing Social Research. Introduces the main worldviews underpinning different types of social research and identifies their characteristic views of social reality. Explores the political and ethical issues related to social research and the implications for research design. A range of methods is introduced some of which students will practice using in a piece of authentic research.

Unit content

1. Theories and paradigms in social research
2. Politics and ethics in social research
3. Positioning our research ‘selves’; multi-methods and the generation of knowledge
4. Designing a piece of research related to staff research activities
5. Questionnaires: design, sampling, issues of reliability and validity
6. Qualitative interviews: in-depth, narrative, semi-structured, focus groups
7. Observation and ethnographic approaches: techniques, recording and analysis
8. Documentary analysis and use of secondary sources.
9. Qualitative analysis: transcribing, organising, reducing and coding data. Thematic and content analysis.
10. Quantitative analysis: coding, code books, basic statistics up to means and standard deviations, content analysis.

Availabilities

Not currently available in 2014

Learning outcomes and graduate attributes

Unit Learning Outcomes express learning achievement in terms of what a student should know, understand and be able to do on completion of a unit. These outcomes are aligned with the graduate attributes. The unit learning outcomes and graduate attributes are also the basis of evaluating prior learning.

On completion of this unit, students should be able to:

GA1: Intellectual rigour, GA2: Creativity, GA3: Ethical practice, GA4: Knowledge of a discipline, GA5: Lifelong learning, GA6: Communication and social skills, GA7: Cultural competence
Learning outcome count Learning outcome description GA1 GA2 GA3 GA4 GA5 GA6 GA7
1 explain different paradigmatic approaches to social reality
2 discuss the political and ethical issues related to social research
3 understand and be able to reflect critically upon different methods of research
4 conduct research using a variety of reactive and non-reactive methods
5 report original research in oral and written form.

On completion of this unit, students should be able to:

  1. explain different paradigmatic approaches to social reality
    • GA4:
  2. discuss the political and ethical issues related to social research
    • GA4:
  3. understand and be able to reflect critically upon different methods of research
    • GA1:
  4. conduct research using a variety of reactive and non-reactive methods
    • GA5:
  5. report original research in oral and written form.
    • GA5: