Article by Malcolm Williams, Cardiff University. This article also appears in the Summer 2012 issue of the MethodsNews newsletter.
Research methods teaching in the UK may have many small challenges, but the really big one is how can we successfully produce enough quantitatively skilled social scientists?
With the exception of psychology and economics, UK social science was and indeed remains mostly 'qualitative'. In subjects such as sociology quantitative methods were all but absent in research reported in the main UK journals, undergraduate students were not enthusiastic about learning quantitative methods and quantitative methods teachers felt isolated from substantive subject areas. In the mid to late 2000s the ESRC began to recognise there was a problem and a number of initiatives were launched to diagnose the nature of the problem, an international scoping review and some small scale studies of good practice were funded. In 2009 Professor John MacInnes was appointed as a Strategic Advisor for the Undergraduate Teaching of Quantitative Methods. Since then we have moved from diagnosis to action.
Consequently the Teaching Research Methods session at the 5th ESRC Research Methods Festival had a somewhat celebratory air, that the need to produce quantitatively literate social scientists was now a mainstream issue for government, universities and the ESRC. Since the first Festival in 2004 there has been a shift from seeing the problem as simply a deficit of number, to a wider appreciation of the pedagogic issues of how students might do research and how we teach them. The Festival presentations reflected this new approach. Four of the five presentations focussed on how quantitative methods can be more organically integrated into the curriculum, whilst the fifth focussed on the ways quantitative teaching skills can be developed in staff. Mark Brown showed how at Manchester University quantitative content would be delivered by the methods team in substantive modules as diverse as Race and Ethnicity and the Sociology of Spiritual Life. Similarly Luke Sloan demonstrated how an experimental approach, at Cardiff and Plymouth universities, will test the efficacy of 'embedding' quantitative content in second stage undergraduate modules, in comparison to more traditional stand alone methods modules. Emily Clough, from Newcastle University, illustrated a similar embedding approach in politics seminars and course work, whilst Carole Sutton from Plymouth University showed large groups of first year sociology undergraduates use field trips to gather their own data and analyse these in the context of existing data about the location. Julie Scott Jones from Manchester Metropolitan University focussed on the ways quantitative teaching skills can be developed in staff.
These new integrated approaches do not aim to replace dedicated quantitative methods modules, but to show how data and methods can be used in substantive discipline areas. A module would not aim to embed a whole methods course, but rather content and skills appropriate to that subject. A typical lecture may, for example, present contemporary, historic or cross national data on women's participation in the labour market. The students then might undertake some simple data manipulation or analyses using (say) a subset of the Labour Force Survey. It is hypothesised, and indeed there is evidence from other countries to show, that learning is broader and deeper when it is within a subject context that interests the student.
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There are now ESRC initiatives in around 20 universities, who are the pioneers for new approaches to teaching quantitative methods. The scale of these projects and even larger ones in future will allow us to ascertain what works and what does not, but this year's Festival session demonstrated that at last a revolution has begun in the teaching of quantitative methods in the UK.
If you would like to learn more about these initiatives, or join the network of quantitative methods teachers please go to the ESRC webpage about quantitative methods resources for undergraduate teaching.