This is a draft of the presentation that will be given at the HEA Social Sciences annual conference - Teaching forward: the future of the Social Sciences. For further details of the conference: http://bit.ly/1cRDx0p Bookings open until 19 May 2014 http://bit.ly/1hzCMLR or external.events@heacademy.ac.uk ABSTRACT This paper reports on a project exploring the ‘state of the art’ in teaching social science research methods to undergraduate medical students. Drawing on ongoing research involving reviewing the literature and consultation with the 32 UK medical schools, I will describe some of the emerging issues around the content, organisation, delivery and assessment of provision of teaching and learning and propose some early thoughts about opportunities and challenges in developing and supporting the academics and learners in this field. The session will be interactive including opportunities for participants to reflect on, to debate and discuss the extent to which these issues are germane to their practice and experience and my emerging prospectus for social scientists ‘working away from home’ in medical education and indeed in other disciplines.

1. Simon Forrest
School of Medicine, Pharmacy and Health
Durham University

2. Please write me a postcard
Do you teach social science research methods outside your
?
What challenges does this pose for you?
What would be the single greatest support to your practice?

3. • Context and drivers
• This project
• Emerging issues
• Emerging ideas
• Questions

4. Context
Changing landscape of health needs and healthcare

5. Social sciences and medicine and health
Medicine
and
Healthcare
Public Policy
and Health
Patient
perspectives
Public health
Psycho-social
theories of
behaviour and
behaviour
changes
Psychology
Medical
sociology
Sociology

6. Medical Education: framework and prescription

7. The project
• What is the current practice around teaching social science research
methods to undergraduate medical students in the UK: what is
being taught, how are teaching and learning organised within the
curriculum, how is content is delivered, to and by whom and how is
student learning assessed?
• And, what are the challenges and opportunities around developing
this teaching and learning practice and the curriculum and policy
contexts that frame it?
Capturing u u
involved this organising and delivering this teaching across all 32
Medical Schools in the UK complemented by a review of the literature.

8. Emerging issues
Defining methods: used for or borrowed from
social science? Method, approach to analysis,
choice of topic?
Parachute – paradigms and epistemologies –
determinism, postivism, interpretivism,
constructivism, identities/subjectivities, (super)
structural relationships of biological and psycho-
, &

9. Structural diversity
Realisation of TDs LOs in curriculum structures
and content

11. Organisation of teaching and learning
• EBM, PH, BSS etc.
• T P j
• The elective model
• The intercalation (into medical education)
model
• UG versus PG

12. Working away from home
• Weakened or absent collegial support
• Disciplinary support and currency of
knowledge
• Teaching versus research
• Research context (Clinical, PH, Med Ed.)
• Status and career trajectorie

13. Student engagement
• N u
• Clinical (ir)relevance
• Programme learning relevance (assessment)
• Students as partners in research

14. Impact on practice
• Evidential wilderness
– Where we would expect to see the impact?
• Proximal – performance in assessment
• Medial – future activities as medics
• Distal – Patient benefit

15. Way of seeing
• Not pragmatics but paradigms
• Not content but core ideas
• – in the Age of Fact –
information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their
capacities to assimilate it. It is not only the skills of reason that they
… … qu
use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid
summations of what is going on in the world and of what might be
v . I qu … j u
scholars, artists and public, scientists and editors are coming to
• C. Wright Mills (1959:11)

16. Ways of knowing
• Reflexivity
• Subject-object relations
• Knowledge acts and acts of knowledge are
situated in Structure – culture – agency

17. Questions
• W u -social
scientist to be competent/safe/appropriate to
engage in empirical research?
• What might social scientists gain from
engagement with medics? (which way does
the traffic run?)
• What happens to the social scientist who
( u )?