WHAT About Social Research?

Encourage your students to engage with social research by using this simple template.

It’s probably no great secret that for the majority of sociology and psychology students research methods is probably the area of their course they find both the least interesting and most difficult to understand.

The two may or may not be connected.

One area in particular in which students invariably struggle is in their understanding of original research, mainly because it can present itself as difficult to manage and digest in ways that are student-friendly. College students, after all, are not the primary audience and few, if any, research studies make any concessions to this.

So, if the mountain won’t come to Muhammad it’s our job to help Muhammad get to the mountain. And climb it, if you’re interested in mixing your metaphors.

While I can’t promise to make the topic more interesting, there are ways to make it more understandable (which, in turn, may or may not make it more interesting), one of which is to use the Ikea Effect to help students build their knowledge and understanding in a way of their own choosing.

Albeit with your substantial behind-the-scenes help.

The Ikea Effect, in a nutshell, is the idea that people tend to value something more if they’ve played some part in creating it – even if, in the case of Ikea furniture, it’s just following a set of pre-printed instructions that lets you to assemble a factory-made bookcase, bed or bentwood armchair (nice…). It’s an effect that derives, in the main, from Festinger’s concept of “effort justification” – the idea that we tend to value things more if we’ve expended some effort in helping to create them.

Now, you may be thinking this is all-very-good-and-interesting (I could be wrong…), but what’s it got to do with research methods?

And the answer, in a roundabout way, is that if you can get your students interested in reading – and most-importantly understanding – research studies you’re going a long way towards both making methods more interesting and showing them how they can apply their knowledge and understanding of research studies to their advantage when it comes to impressing examiners.

As an added bonus, you can take-advantage of the Ikea Effect to encourage your students to value the work they do, by providing them with a set of pre-printed instructions that tell them exactly what they have to do to create a coherent and useful set of notes about a wide range of research studies.

WHAT?

What, you may ask, is WHAT?

It’s a strong, yet simple, way to analyse and evaluate any research study by creating a scaffold that forces your students to always think and write in terms of four distinct categories (think of it as a set of pre-printed instructions that guides students towards creating a comprehensive set of notes about any given research study):

• What were the aims of the study?

Identify the key ideas the researcher/s examined.

• How did they do it?

Identify the method/s used in the research and details of the sample, if applicable

• Answers: What were the key findings of the research?

Identify the main results of the study.

• Takeaways?

Identify the main conclusions can we / the researcher/s draw from the study and its findings

As you’ll see from the WHAT template I’ve so thoughtfully included in both pdf format and as a Word document, the basic idea is to get students to select the most important information they need from a research study. There’s not a great deal of space for each answer, so students need to think carefully about what they’re going to write and how they’re going to express it – something that will also come in handy when it’s time to revise.

Finally…

Once students know the WHAT of any research study they can use this information as the foundation for doing more interesting things, such as considering the strengths and limitations of a study or showing how it links to or deviates from the findings of other, similar, studies.