The Teaching and Learning of Social Research Methods Developments in Pedagogical Knowledge

The importance of the teaching and learning of social research methods is increasingly recognised by research councils and policy bodies as crucial to the drive to increase capacity amongst the research community. The need for greater scholarly engagement with how research methods are taught and learnt is also driven by the realisation that epistemological and methodological developments have not been accompanied by a pedagogical literature or culture. Training initiatives need this pedagogic input if they are to realise the educational aspirations for methodologically skilled and competent researchers, able to apply, adapt and reflect on a range of high-level research methods and approaches. The contributors to this collection have fully engaged with this need to develop and share pedagogical knowledge in relation to the teaching of research methods. Together they span qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods, a range of disciplinary and national contexts, and face-to-face and blended teaching and learning. Through detailed examples, the collection addresses how best teaching practices develop in response to distinctive challenges that will resonate with readers; in so doing it will inspire and inform their own development. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology.

Introduction: The teaching and learning of social research methods: developments in pedagogical knowledge 1. The problems and prospects in the teaching of mixed methods research 2. ‘I’m not a quants person’; key strategies in building competence and confidence in staff who teach quantitative research methods’ 3. Embedding quantitative skills into the social science curriculum: case studies from Manchester 4. Teaching social research methods after the critical turn: challenges and benefits of a constructivist pedagogy 5. From guided-instruction to facilitation of learning: the development of Five-level QDA as a CAQDAS pedagogy that explicates the practices of expert users 6. Learning to manage and share data: jump-starting the research methods curriculum 7. Using video and dialogue to generate pedagogic knowledge: teachers, learners and researchers reflecting together on the pedagogy of social research methods

Melanie Nind is professor of education at University of Southampton, UK, where she is a co-director of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) and Principal Investigator for the Pedagogy of Methodological Learning study. Daniel Kilburn is a teaching fellow at University College London, UK, and was the research fellow on the NCRM study, Capacity building in social science research methods. Rebekah Luff is senior research fellow at NCRM.