Summer School

Comparative case studies are a powerful research design to help test and build theories in all areas of social science. They help establish and test 'boundary conditions' as well as testing the limits of social theories in specific contexts. But they can be challenging to design and execute. Researchers can find themselves several stages into a comparative case design project without really having thought through what are the boundaries of the cases, what are the points of comparative similarity and difference, and what causal mechanisms we are 'looking for'. This can bring problems for the analytical and theory development stages of a project.

Teaching quantitative methods for the first time can be a daunting task, particularly trying to strike the right balance between depth of detail, practical examples, and prior knowledge of the class. This session will offer a practical discussion around the realities of teaching quantitative methods from the undergraduate to post-graduate level. We will talk about best practices for achieving a productive learning environment, what you should expect from yourself, and what you might expect from your students.

In this event, we will deliver a training programme that will equip research students with the skills to adapt their research to changing circumstances and uncertainty. We envision that the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to impact research planning throughout at least the first half of 2021, hence we consider this event to be timely and relevant to a large number of students.

This workshop aims to introduce and explain what can be described as new materialist approaches to research. It aims to offer first an introduction to new materialist ontology, and second an explanation of how this might be translated into a research methodology in the social sciences.

The LGBTQ+ community is a heavily researched group. However, issues still arise in how they are engaged with and represented. This workshop is broken down into two sections. The first section will feature a lecture and Q&A on the production of data on the LGBTQ+ community in the next round of censuses. The 2021/2022 censuses will be the first to ask about sexual orientation and gender modality. This will provide the first estimates of trans populations in Scotland, England and Wales and a more expansive understanding of sexual orientation demographics across the UK. For researchers, this is a crucial leap forward as it enables a better assessment of research representativeness.