Naturalistic Observation Lesson Plan
I’m a firm believer that when it comes to teaching research methods you can never have too many examples of lesson plans that either simulate the process of “doing research” or, as in the case of Bernard C. Beins (Counting Fidgets: Teaching the Complexity of Naturalistic Observation), turn it into a simple, but effective, lesson […]
The Sociological Detectives: Hiding in Plain Sight
In this third outing in the Research Methods series, the Sociological Detectives investigate Overt Participant Observation through a simple piece of hands-on research. This PowerPoint Presentation – the 3rd in the Research Methods series (the others being The Research Process and Non-Participant Observation) – combines a hands-on approach to doing Overt Participant Observation with a […]
Psychology Learning Tables | 2
Convention dictates this second set of Learning Tables, primarily the work of Miss G. Banton (with one notable exception that I’ll explain in a moment) follows the first set of Tables and since this is not a rule I’m overly-inclined to break it’s only seems right-and-proper this should be the case. These Tables are broadly-designed […]
Chinese Parents’ Involvement in Children’s Education
Regular readers of this blog will be aware that from time-to-time we’ve been able to feature research done by Richard Driscoll’s Sociology A-level students at the Shenzhen College of International Education in China and the latest study to come our way, by Ma Jia Ying, looks at the involvement of Chinese parents in decisions made […]
Conducting Psychological Research
This is a free chapter, from an unpublished textbook by Shelia Kennison of Oklahoma State University, that you can either read online or download as a pdf document. The chapter covers a range of ideas and issues focused on the research process: • different research methodologies • causality • experimentation • representative sampling • reliability and […]
11 | The Research Process: Part 4
The final part of the Research Methods chapter covers the use of mixed methods in the context of sociological research and is split into three theoretically-discrete, but related, areas: 1. Methodological pluralism involves the idea of combining methodologies, methods and data types to arrive at a more-rounded, reliable and valid insight into social behaviour. 2. […]
8 | The Research Process: Part 1
While Research Methods at a-level aren’t everyone’s cup of tea they can be interesting if students are given the time and space to bring together the theory with the practice. Unfortunately I can’t help you here with the practice (although I can give you a few pointers about how to carry-out a range of cheap […]
NotAFactsheet: Research Ethics
This NotAFactsheet on Research Ethics is a slight departure from previous NotAFactsheets in that it comes in two flavours: 1. The normal “text with box-outs and pictures-if-you’re-lucky” version. 2. An experimental version with an added bit of embedded video (click-the-pic-to-play). Although not ideal, the video is in Flash (.flv) format for reasons that are much […]
Ethics: Adding Research Funding into the Mix
Ethics refer to the morality of doing something and ethical questions relating to research involve beliefs about what a researcher should or should not do before, during and after their research. As a matter of course, this normally includes considering both legal and safety issues Legal considerations include things like: Legality: e.g. Breaching Data Protection […]