This literature review was written as part of the C-SAP (Higher Education Academy's Centre for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics) project "Discovering Collections of Social Science Open Educational Resources". The project ran from August 2010 - August 2011 as part of Phase 2 of the HEFCE-funded Open Educational Resources (OER) programme. The programme focused in particular on issues related to the discovery and use of OER by academics and was managed jointly by the Higher Education Academy [HEA] and Joint Information Systems Committee [JISC].

1. Sociology and Anthropology Briefings for C‐SAP (Higher Education
Academy Subject Centre for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics)
Collections Project
Kate Orton‐Johnson (University of Edinburgh)
Ian Fairweather
April 2011
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2. Sociology and Anthropology Briefings by Collections Reviewers
This subject briefing is part of the C-SAP "Discovering Collections of Social Science Open
Educational Resources" project which runs from August 2010 - August 2011 as part of Phase 2 of the
HEFCE-funded Open Educational Resources (OER) programme. The programme focuses in
particular on issues related to the discovery and use of OER by academics and is managed jointly by
the Higher Education Academy [HEA] and Joint Information Systems Committee [JISC].
Sociology briefing: Kate Orton‐Johnson
For all students across the subject areas of the school (Politics, Social Anthropology, Social Policy,
Sociology, Social Work, Canadian Studies, Science/Technology Studies, and South Asian Studies)
methods teaching is formally core from the second year (although substantive and methodological
teaching is not seen as a distinct or mutually exclusive as part of introductory first year teaching).
In the second year the required methods course is the interdisciplinary semester-length team-taught
course Social and Political Enquiry. This introduces students to a range of methods, examines the
potential and problems of these methods, and helps students to think about the interpretation and
analysis of data. It focuses on a series of exemplary studies conducted by social and political
scientists, both classic and contemporary and in each case considers how the research questions
were formulated, how these questions were addressed and answered, and how the evidence was
produced, interpreted and evaluated, including issues of objectivity, values and policy.
rd th
The core subject specific Sociology methods teaching is situated in the 3 and 4 year of the degree
with 2 compulsory courses: ‘Designing and doing social research’ and ‘Doing survey research’. The
emphasis of these courses is on students learning to do social research and assessing how well
others have done it. ‘Designing & Doing Social Research’ offers an overview of the research process
and ends with a group project. It explores issues of qualitative data analysis and introduces students
to the principles of research design and research practicalities and ethics. ‘Doing Survey Research’
focuses on the analysis of survey data and includes basic statistics and the learning of a computer
package for the manipulation of numerical data. Analysis techniques are developed by looking at
datasets based on large-scale social surveys.
In addition the Sociology project and project preparation sessions in year 4 which students are
required to complete aim to provide a practical application of methodological skills and knowledge.
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3. What do you currently know about online collections of relevance to teaching research methods?
Speaking to colleagues across the school there appears to be wide variation in knowledge and use of
online collections of teaching materials. Most colleagues I spoke with use searches of on-line
methods journals for current debates e.g.. on informed consent, ethics, research design, multi-level
models, although the BSA ESRC-linked Methods sites, SSRN, Soc Res Assoc (SRA) and SRU,
Surrey were also cited as potential sites for research methods teaching resources.
I personally also tend to use Google Scholar searcher to look for specific examples or resources in
my qualitative methods teaching and have draw on resources from the CAQDAS networking
project http://caqdas.soc.surrey.ac.uk/ but primarily the resources I use are journal articles rather than
online collections. Particularly in qualitative methods teaching colleagues have appear to have little
awareness of online collections and are not entirely sure what is meant by the term.
ESDS was cited as a useful source of support material particularly for the workbooks that introduce
students to SPSS for Windows (v15), Stata and NESSTAR, as well as guides for weighting, analysing
change over time and working with data files (including hierarchical data, matching files and pooling
data).
For colleagues teaching quantitative methods the following were listed as useful online resources for
teaching:
 http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/tutorial/socialstatistics
Intute web tutorial on using the web to locate social statistics, with a good page of links to sources
of social statistics, as well as general advice on sources of information for academic use on the
web.
 http://databank.worldbank.org/ddp/home.do
The world bank’s databank. It permits online tabulation and analysis of time series data by country
on a number of development, economic and finance indicators.
 https://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/forstudents/freecourses/statistics
There are two courses in this suite of open access materials provided by Carnegie Mellon
University on Probability and Statistics and Statistical Reasoning. They are suitable for ‘absolute
beginners’ with excellent graphics, tutorials and self test exercises. However, while they use many
social science examples, they are not designed to be specific to any discipline, so that a
significant proportion of the material is from a non social science context. They are not linked to
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4. data analysis software packages (such as SPSS) although students can use excel or R for the
associated ‘statTutor’ exercises.
 http://www.csupomona.edu/~jlkorey/POWERMUTT/faculty.html
The POWERMUTT (Politically-Oriented Web-Enhanced Research Methods for Undergraduates
— Topics and Tools) site is a suite of resources, based on SPSS for teaching introductory
quantitative research design and analysis aimed at political science undergraduates
 http://onlinestatbook.com/
Introductory online statistics textbook with simulations and self tests. There is no social science
context, but the simulations are useful, for example, for demonstrating how the shape of
distributions change with different means and standard deviations or how sampling distributions
change with different sample sizes. There is also a Java applet allowing students to estimate
regression line by eye, and have the mean square error for their estimate calculated, and
compared to the minimum mean square error: useful in teaching regression.
Would you tend to approach the searching and discovery of relevant online materials (defined as
OER or otherwise) from a strict subject discipline approach?
Most colleagues do not adhere to a strict disciplinary search for materials although sociologically
informed methods were prioritised. As a research driven institution there is a tendency for examples
to be drawn from lecturers own research interests and for data examples to be drawn from ongoing
research projects (suitably anonymised etc for teaching purposes). At 1st and 2ndyear undergraduate
level, as well as postgraduate level, there is the ongoing tension of teaching students from a range of
disciplinary backgrounds and trying to find a balance between examples that are not so generic that
they are not of interest to students and examples that are relevant to 1 particular subject area and not
another.
Subject specific example can be extremely useful if they happen to suit the course and the teaching
you are doing on that course but sometimes generic resources can be better precisely because they
are not so limited (or limiting) in scope.
Have you taken research methods resources from online sources and incorporated them into your
own materials? Would you tend to develop all of your own materials ‘in‐house’? If so, why?
Obviously the preference to not to re-invent the wheel with resources but the difficultly of integrating
some resources into an existing course structure, and to ensure that students perceive them as
central and relevant in order to increase engagement with these resources, is often more work, or as
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5. much work as developing individual course examples or exercises ‘in house’. The key issues here are
of granularity and adaptability – generic and subject specific resources found online are not often
adaptable enough to be incorporated into teaching (particularly undergraduate teaching) easily or
logically and this is often the key problem or reason for lecturers not using online materials.
Do you use multimedia resources in the teaching of research methods?
Multimedia examples are use in teaching – my own use come particularly with postgraduate teaching
of qualitative data analysis software and the need to code and analysis visual, video and web data.
Do you regularly seek feedback from students about materials used to support your teaching of
research methods?
The main feedback mechanism is via formal course feedback evaluations questionnaires, of which
feedback on course materials and resources used is a part.
Anthropology Briefing
What (briefly) is the state of teaching research methods courses in your institution/your
discipline? How is it situated in your programmes
Research methods courses have an ambiguous position in anthropology. Most social sciences are
defined by their subject matter and research questions and they have developed an array of methods
in order to pursue them effectively. First year anthropology students, however, are taught that
anthropology is a discipline defined by its method. The method in question being ‘participant
observation’ carried out through long term ethnographic fieldwork. This often creates the impression
that anthropology is a discipline with only one method. Of course that would be an over-simplification
as fieldwork itself might involve the anthropologist in using a variety of techniques from surveys and
interviews to archival research the rich qualitative data generated by long-term participant observation
has to be sorted and analyzed. In fact, there is considerable discussion among anthropologists about
fieldwork, ethnography and the writing process, but this is rarely signposted as specifically a
discussion about methods. As a result much methods teaching tends to be incorporated into courses
and where students are given specific methods teaching it is usually in courses about ‘doing fieldwork’
or ‘ethnographic methods’.
On the other hand, anthropology students are often required to take general social science methods
courses in order to familiarize themselves with a wider variety of social science methods, but these
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6. are sometimes experienced as disconnected and are seen to have little relevance. Part of the
problem is that discussions about methods in anthropology often don’t make use of the same
terminology as the wider social sciences. A further complication is that anthropology is a broad field of
study with a number of distinct sub-disciplines. Areas such as visual anthropology, material culture
studies, biological anthropology and forensic anthropology have developed specialist research
methods that are very different from those used in other areas. For that reason these methods tend to
be incorporated into specialist courses and course-givers rely on their own expertise or on the
literature specific to the sub-disciplines
At Manchester anthropology is located in the School of Social Sciences alongside sociology, politics,
philosophy, economics and social statistics. The school sits within the broader faculty of humanities.
Teaching research methods takes place in all disciplines for undergraduates from 1st year onwards
and the majority is delivered within disciplines. The situation is slightly different for students taking
cross disciplinary degree programmes. The largest of these is the BA (Economic and Social Studies)
degree run by the School of Social Sciences and Manchester Business School. This programme
offers 29 different combinations covering Accounting, Business Studies, Development Studies,
Finance, Economic and Social History, Economic Studies, Politics, Social Anthropology, Criminology
and Sociology. In the first year of the degree all students follow a general and broad programme of
study which includes Economics, Politics, the Social Sciences and either Quantitative Methods or
Social Research Methods, depending on intended area of specialization. First year anthropology
undergraduates take the social research methods course.
For postgraduates there is a combination of disciplinary methods teaching and cross school or cross
faculty provision. As well as discipline specific methods courses PGR students are required to choose
3 introductory 5-credit methods modules from a list that includes both qualitative and quantitative
methods. An important development in the last few years has been the cross faculty research
methods centre methods@manchester to provide methods training and promote interdisciplinary and
innovative methodological developments. As well as promoting and facilitating methods-related
events across the university methods@manchester offers an annual competition to fund methods-
related activities that promote interdisciplinary, innovation.
http://www.methods.manchester.ac.uk/
What do you currently know about online collections of relevance to teaching research methods?
Most of what I know about online methods collections comes from working with C-SAP or
methods@manchester and would not necessarily have been obvious to lecturers in anthropology. My
sense is that there is a wide variation in colleagues’ awareness of and use of online methods
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7. resources. In particular, those colleagues who are involved ion teaching cross disciplinary methods
courses, or courses devoted to ethnographic methods are more likely to use online collections whilst
those who incorporate methods discussion into otherwise theoretical courses are more likely to use
published material from the anthropological literature, especially journals and textbooks. Anthropology
is largely qualitative and anthropology student’s exposure to quantitative methods is most likely to
take place in cross-disciplinary courses.
The Association of Social Anthropologists web site http://www.theasa.org/links.shtml provides a
statement on ethics and links to databases and journals which colleagues might use to search for
discipline specific methods resources. Similarly the Royal Anthropological Institute
website http://www.therai.org.uk/ hosts ‘Anthropological Index Online’, an online bibliography of
anthropology-related journals held in the Centre for Anthropology at the British Museum, London. The
American Anthropological Association website http://www.aaanet.org/index.cfm hosts ‘AnthroNotes’ A
biannual, free, 20-page publication providing lead articles on current anthropological research,
teaching activities and strategies, and reviews of teaching resources. Most colleagues would also use
Google Scholar to search for resources and many are aware of the C-SAP website and the Intute
database as a source for methods teaching resources, especially those looking for resources that are
not anthropology specific. Colleagues are more likely to be aware of resources centrally developed
within their institution such as the methods@manchester resource.
Would you tend to approach the searching and discovery of relevant online materials (defined as
OER or otherwise) from a strict subject discipline approach?
As I teach two explicitly cross-disciplinary methods courses it is necessary to use either generic
resources or resources from a number of different disciplines so I am often looking for non discipline
specific, or non anthropology methods resources and I find searching for online resources to be a
particularly useful way to do this because I can search by topic or keyword rather than having to wade
through unfamiliar journals or rely on textbooks. My sense, however, is that colleagues incorporating
methods teaching into anthropology course are more likely to look for specifically anthropology
resources or use examples from their own work. Students seeking methods resources for themselves
are also likely to look for discipline specific resources. I think part of the reason for this is the different
terminologies used so that students and teachers feel more comfortable with resources from their own
discipline.
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8. Have you taken research methods resources from online sources and incorporated them into your
own materials?
When I first began teaching methods I relied more on textbook, but I am increasingly looking for ways
to incorporate online material. I am moving towards a more enquiry-based learning approach to
methods teaching and online resources are more engaging and accessible to students than
textbooks. However the advantage of developing resources in-house is greater control over what
students are using. Just pointing students to online resources is often insufficient as they need
contextual information in order to perceive the resources as relevant.
Do you use multimedia resources in the teaching of research methods?
Increasingly so. Student engagement with methods teaching is notoriously low and in order to
improve this I think it is necessary to provide students with opportunities for a variety of ‘hands on’
experience of methods. Multimedia resources help to achieve this.
Do you regularly seek feedback from students about materials used to support your teaching of
research methods?
Feedback is through formal student evaluation procedures at the end of the course and informal
questionnaires halfway through. I hope to incorporate a more reflective element into my courses
which would provide more ongoing feedback
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