This document outlines the topics and activities to be covered in a university course on research design. It includes discussions of research ethics, developing a research plan and time management strategies, qualitative and quantitative research methods, and examples of developing research questions and designs. Students will engage in paired and group exercises to practice developing ethical research protocols, timelines, and questions aligned with different methodological approaches. The goal is to help students understand the logical process of designing sound social science research.

1. DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY
Research Questions to Research
Design (SY7034)
Edmund Chattoe-Brown
ecb18@le.ac.uk
Thursdays 1500-1700 (Brookfield 0.24)

2. WEEK 8

3. 1. Plan
• Administration.
• Research ethics.
• Scheduling and self management.
• Break.
• Examples of research design logic.
• The challenge of collecting data.
• Divergence between qualitative and quantitative
research.

4. 2. Administration
• Registration.

5. 3. Scuglia 1
• What about this article?

6. 4. Scuglia 2
• This was written by a machine!
• http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/
• These cite each other!
• Sokal Hoax.
• Ethics? Sponging versus deception.
• The scientific method protects us from writing
junk as well as protecting others from having
to read it.

7. 5. Ethics
• A formal aspect (meeting December 10).
• A personal aspect: Laud Humphreys and Nancy Scheper-
Hughes.
• A research design aspect, particularly access (betting shop
example.)
• Start thinking now: Which “box” are you in?
• “How would you like it?”
• Ethical thinking has to be flexible, imaginative, careful and
“personal”. Example: Sloppy or pointless research.
• Format: “No problem” research, justifiable issues or “escalate”.

8. 6. Ethical vignette 1
• As a researcher interviewing children you have
a legal obligation to report any disclosures of
abuse by your respondents. You are doing a
piece of evaluation research on children’s use
of playgrounds for the local council. Do you tell
the parents about your obligation when
securing their informed consent for the
interviews with their children?

9. 7. Ethical vignette 2
• You are doing ethnography in a large and
under funded local hospital looking at the
relative effectiveness of outsourced and “in
house” services. While carrying out informal
interviews in the kitchens you notice a large
quantity of food being loaded surreptitiously
into an unmarked van outside. What do you
do?

10. 8. Ethical vignette 3
• You are working on a doctorate that involves carrying
out a very sophisticated statistical analysis. There is
only one other team that has published such an
analysis and their results are widely known. Because
you are having difficulty making the method work, you
contact the team and they are extremely helpful
providing data, advice and technical support.
However, while replicating their analysis for your own
benefit, you discover that the result they have got is
not only different from yours but apparently
impossible. What do you do?

11. 9. Ethical vignette 4
• You are interviewing someone about their
experiences of tourism when, suddenly, they
burst into tears and start describing a sexual
assault. It becomes clear that this event
happened on the holiday you have asked them
to describe in detail and that they have
apparently blotted it from their memory. What
do you do next?

12. 10. Benedek
• Scale: With hindsight some historical research ethics
“fails” are truly awful. (But that’s with hindsight: Don’t be
today’s “awful fail”.)
• Flexibility: Effective treatment became available during the
study.
• Difficulty: Non treatment of control groups for the
“common good”. (Best treatment comparison: Bad
Pharma by Ben Goldacre.)
• Bureaucracy: Complications of a big project (Coxon).
• Holism: Lack of informed consent matters almost as much
as non treatment?

13. 11. Scheduling
• How many of the limitations of the formatives were
really about lack of understanding or “difficulty” in the
research?
• Not that many people arranged to come and see me.
• Putting in the hours. (How long did this take you?)
• Without a plan you can’t check progress: See self-
management.
• Can’t expect a perfect plan right off (but that doesn’t
matter.)

14. 12. Exercise 1 (15 minutes)
• In pairs.
• How many weeks between now and submission?
• Which weeks do you plan to spend time on this?
• How many hours will you have available in those
weeks? (Don’t count “two hour” weeks.)
• How much time (or which weeks) will be used for
reading, fieldwork, analysis, writing up and so on?
• How long does it take you to read an article or write
1000 words?

15. 13. Self Management
• Everyone has psychological tendencies they have to
overcome but just because everyone has them doesn’t mean
everyone overcomes them!
• Avoiding discomfort: More reading versus cold calling
gatekeepers. Have a plan and “balance” tough jobs with
“treats”.
• Displacement: Just doing other things. Have a plan.
• Strength bias: It is the weakest part of your dissertation that
will let you down not your strongest part. Critical thinking.
Show it around.
• Perfectionism: Starting tomorrow, “abandoning” a “bad day”,
planning to do 20 hours straight writing.

16. 14. Exercise 2 (10 minutes)
• What are the things that “undermine” your
study effectiveness? What do you do about
them? Does it work?

17. 15. Bearman, Moody and Stovel
• New methods idea: Social networks.
• Sophisticated research design: What are networks
actually like? How does that fit with existing theories of
disease transmission? How might we explain the
networks actually observed?
• Ethical issue: Bureaucratic dominance of research ethics
by medics. Who “owns” a network relation. Can I “name”
Mary as a sexual partner? Interesting technical “solution”
(or work around) using attributes of named respondents.

18. 16. Break
• 10 minute “comfort break”.

19. 17. Research design background
• Most of this is not really about research methods at
all. It is a mixture of logic and “common sense”
(actually not at all common but not dependent on
technical knowledge).
• Example of motivating importance of gender
stereotypes.
• Getting your research method “right” is a big part of
this. Definitely limits how far you can go wrong.
• Both White and Gorard point out that the biggest
problem is that people simply don’t.

20. 18. Exercise 3 (15 minutes)
• Quantitative research shows low youth participation in politics
(for example voting.) I want to explore the role that social
networking sites have in political participation among the young.
• Work in pairs.
• What research design would be needed to show this effect?
• What theories/hypotheses might inform this research?
• What research design hazards need to be avoided?
• Under what circumstances can social networking sites have a
positive effect on political participation while quantitative
research shows low youth participation in politics overall?

21. 19. Exercise 4 (15 minutes)
• Research tends to show paid work has a negative effect on the
education of students but this disregards the skills they acquire
in paid work.
• Work in pairs.
• What research design would be needed to show this effect?
• What theories/hypotheses might be used to inform this
research?
• What research design hazards need to be avoided?
• Under what circumstances might paid work increase student
skills while still having a negative effect on their education?
• Is this advocacy research?

22. 20. Notes
• Both of these have the same basic “challenge”: To
reconcile potentially incompatible data.
• Solutions may be logical (one hypothesis or result is
just wrong) or based on good research design.

23. 21. Exercise 5 (15 minutes)
• Work in pairs.
• How would you measure the impact of British culture
on Kurdish migrants?
• Try to come up with effective questions to access this
effect (either for a survey or qualitative interviews.)
• What issues arise in trying to ask questions about
this? How do your questions deal with them?

24. 22. Exercise 6 (if time)
• Work in pairs. Choose one example:
– Impact of Indian culture in UK.
– Football attendance.
– Wellbeing of Chinese international students.
– Young people, politics and online social networking.
• What are the differences between a qualitative and
quantitative study here? What would you find out?
What kinds of research questions would it fit with?
What could you do with the data?

25. 23. Notes
• A research area is not a research question.
• An exact research question is needed to choose a
research method.
• Qualitative research cannot be “generally better” than
quantitative research or vice versa.
• Remember why we are asking you to do this
comparison. (Don’t just convince us: Convince
yourself!)