Research design is a core component of every good research paper, irrespective of is theoretical approach or type of empirical evidence (quantitative or qualitative) to be collected and analysed. Its importance derives from its features: provides a structure to the analysis, makes data collection systematic, guides readers through the logic of the research enterprise, and increases the reliability and transparency of the research endeavour.
Summer School 2022
14 - 16 June 2022
This year, the SGSSS Summer School returns as an in-person event at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh from 14th – 16th June.
With a wide variety of interesting and useful workshops over three days, plus opportunities to socialise and say hello to some visiting alpacas, the Summer School will be an exciting way to learn advanced skills, meet other PhD students, and be inspired by ideas and stories.
You can now see the full timetable and plan the sessions you would like to attend.
Registration will open on Monday 23rd May at midday. It will operate a little differently this year; you will first select your sessions, taking care not to double book yourself, then make payment once your sessions are confirmed. Information around payment will be sent to you after you have booked into your first session.
There is a cost of £80 for attending the Summer School, or £95 if accommodation (single ensuite bedrooms provided by Queen Margaret University) is required. If you are only interested in attending for one day, there is a day ticket available for £35.
Any queries in the meantime can be directed to team@sgsss.ac.uk.
We look forward to welcoming you in June!
Days
Hours
Minutes
Seconds
14.
Jun
Tuesday
Research Design - *Online Only Session* - full day course
10:00 am - 5:00 pm
Research design is a core component of every good research paper, irrespective of is theoretical approach or type of empirical evidence (quantitative or qualitative) to be collected and analysed. Its importance derives from its features: provides a structure to the analysis, makes data collection systematic, guides readers through the logic of the research enterprise, and increases the reliability and transparency of the research endeavour.
14.
Jun
Tuesday
Introduction to Systematic Reviews – full day course
11:00 am - 5:00 pm
This two-session workshop will provide participants with the knowledge and a range of practical tools required for conducting a systematic review. A range of approaches to evidence synthesis and systematic reviews will be considered. The workshop will consist of lectures and opportunities for participants to discuss and develop their own reviews through interactive group work and discussions.
14.
Jun
Tuesday
A Primer in Systematic Reviews and Meta-regression
11:00 am - 1:00 pm
Traditionally researchers' literature reviews aspired to summarising the knowledge concerning a research topic. The sheer amount of studies makes this a unrealistic ideal. This brief session is meant to give a very quick overview of what systematic reviews and meta-regressions are and what they can do for social scientists.
14.
Jun
Tuesday
What would an Inclusive New Normal look like in Academic Culture?
11:00 am - 1:00 pm
If inclusion came as a flat pack what would the instructions look like? There were many challenges to working online through covid, but this did also enable new forms of collaboration and allowed more flexible and accessible engagement for those with caring responsibilities, remotely located or coping with immune compromisation and other disabilities. For some online working provided more equitable experiences than they had previously encountered. As working habits again change, how can we keep the best of digital affordances and overcome the challenges that working in hybrid spaces may entail?
14.
Jun
Tuesday
Catching a Break: Regression Discontinuity Designs in the Social Sciences
11:00 am - 1:00 pm
In this session we will introduce the methods of Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD), and provide the opportunity to apply them in a practical lab using Stata.
14.
Jun
Tuesday
Teaching Quantitative Methods for the First Time
11:00 am - 1:00 pm
This workshop will discuss the challenges and strategies for those preparing to teach quantitative methods courses for the first time. The workshop will cover aspects such as book selection, to what level to pitch a course at, to how to handle classes/students that do not engage in lectures. There will be opportunities to work in groups to discuss teaching approaches and chances to ask questions that you have regarding teaching practices.
14.
Jun
Tuesday
Publishing from your PhD? Insights into publishing in accounting, business & management
11:00 am - 1:00 pm
Publishing is our currency in academia and there is a long and steep learning curve to it, because it is not about what we know, nor about how good researchers we are, it is about how we report what we have come to know and also about who we are reporting it to. In this session, we will explore publication strategies, from persuasion strategies to applied formulas, and from co-authoring to reviewing and dealing with reviews.
14.
Jun
Tuesday
Doing Ethnographic Fieldwork
2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
This session will largely focus on in-person ethnographic research both within your own country or a country other than that within which you live.
14.
Jun
Tuesday
Doing Online Collaborative Autoethnography During the Pandemic to Research Academic Precarity
2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
This will be an interactive workshop that will explore the benefits of using an online collaborative autoethnographic approach to reflect on personal and shared experiences. Chang, Heewon et al (2012: 17) describe collaborative autoethnography as a ‘qualitative research method that is simultaneously collaborative, autobiographical and ethnographic’. In this workshop we will look at the practicalities of using such an approach online.
14.
Jun
Tuesday
Social AI and Decision Making
2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Three talks will be delivered by Dr. Chollet, Dr. Lages and Dr. Guha on the topics of AI and decision making for human behaviour and analysis and synthesis.
14.
Jun
Tuesday
NVivo for Qualitative Data Analysis
2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
In this workshop we will look at how to make the best use of NVivo in your qualitative data analysis. We will consider which NVivo tools will be most useful for your PhD study and you will see how to set up an NVivo project. We will also cover how to code your data and where to find help when using NVivo.
14.
Jun
Tuesday
Truth Claiming: avoiding 'atrocity stories' and 'poverty safaris': a facilitated discussion of how we orientate ourselves toward qualitative data using two case studies
2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
The purpose of this workshop is to understand different ways for researchers to orientate themselves toward qualitative data and, in particular, to consider different ways of being 'truthful' to those data. The facilitators will use two extended examples from their own work (an interview study of women's experiences of GP encounters following domestic abuse and a comparative ethnography of men's experiences of the social determinants of health).
Tue Jun 14
11am - 5pm
This two-session workshop will provide participants with the knowledge and a range of practical tools required for conducting a systematic review. A range of approaches to evidence synthesis and systematic reviews will be considered. The workshop will consist of lectures and opportunities for participants to discuss and develop their own reviews through interactive group work and discussions.
Tue Jun 14
11am - 1pm
Traditionally researchers' literature reviews aspired to summarising the knowledge concerning a research topic. The sheer amount of studies makes this a unrealistic ideal. This brief session is meant to give a very quick overview of what systematic reviews and meta-regressions are and what they can do for social scientists.
Tue Jun 14
11am - 1pm
This workshop will discuss the challenges and strategies for those preparing to teach quantitative methods courses for the first time. The workshop will cover aspects such as book selection, to what level to pitch a course at, to how to handle classes/students that do not engage in lectures. There will be opportunities to work in groups to discuss teaching approaches and chances to ask questions that you have regarding teaching practices.
Tue Jun 14
11am - 1pm
If inclusion came as a flat pack what would the instructions look like? There were many challenges to working online through covid, but this did also enable new forms of collaboration and allowed more flexible and accessible engagement for those with caring responsibilities, remotely located or coping with immune compromisation and other disabilities. For some online working provided more equitable experiences than they had previously encountered. As working habits again change, how can we keep the best of digital affordances...
Tue Jun 14
11am - 1pm
Publishing is our currency in academia and there is a long and steep learning curve to it, because it is not about what we know, nor about how good researchers we are, it is about how we report what we have come to know and also about who we are reporting it to. In this session, we will explore publication strategies, from persuasion strategies to applied formulas, and from co-authoring to reviewing and dealing with reviews.
Tue Jun 14
11am - 1pm
In this session we will introduce the methods of Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD), and provide the opportunity to apply them in a practical lab using Stata.
Tue Jun 14
2pm - 5pm
Three talks will be delivered by Dr. Chollet, Dr. Lages and Dr. Guha on the topics of AI and decision making for human behaviour and analysis and synthesis.
Tue Jun 14
2pm - 5pm
In this workshop we will look at how to make the best use of NVivo in your qualitative data analysis. We will consider which NVivo tools will be most useful for your PhD study and you will see how to set up an NVivo project. We will also cover how to code your data and where to find help when using NVivo.
Tue Jun 14
2pm - 5pm
This session will largely focus on in-person ethnographic research both within your own country or a country other than that within which you live.
Tue Jun 14
2pm - 5pm
This will be an interactive workshop that will explore the benefits of using an online collaborative autoethnographic approach to reflect on personal and shared experiences. Chang, Heewon et al (2012: 17) describe collaborative autoethnography as a ‘qualitative research method that is simultaneously collaborative, autobiographical and ethnographic’. In this workshop we will look at the practicalities of using such an approach online.
Tue Jun 14
2pm - 5pm
The purpose of this workshop is to understand different ways for researchers to orientate themselves toward qualitative data and, in particular, to consider different ways of being 'truthful' to those data. The facilitators will use two extended examples from their own work (an interview study of women's experiences of GP encounters following domestic abuse and a comparative ethnography of men's experiences of the social determinants of health).
Wed Jun 15
10am - 5pm
Multilevel modelling is an umbrella term for a wide range of statistical models appropriate for clustered data. Multilevel modelling can be thought of as an extension of the classical Multiple Regression Models that allows the researcher to assess the variation in an outcome of interest at different levels of a predefined hierarchy structure and simultaneously analyse the characteristics associated with that variation.
Wed Jun 15
10am - 1pm
This session will give participants an insight into who, what, why, where, when and even how journalists and producers gather interviews with academics.
Wed Jun 15
10am - 1pm
This workshop will give you the confidence and agency to move forward with your career planning, helping you identify personal skills and strengths, success drivers and values, and what this means for your future post PhD.
Wed Jun 15
10am - 1pm
Participants will understand the methodological underpinnings of sampling in quantitative social sciences research. They will learn to select appropriate sampling procedures, evaluate and critique sampling plans.
Wed Jun 15
10am - 1pm
This session will reflect on the use of comparative case studies as a research design. It is aimed at students who are undertaking - or plan to undertake - a comparative case research design. It is not primarily aimed at disciplines that have well-developed methodological positions on this approach (e.g. comparative political economy) although researchers from those disciplines are welcome to join us.
Wed Jun 15
10am - 1pm
The workshop consists of a lecture/seminar and practical research activities where attendees will learn about anthropological approaches to questions of time, history, and their material culture, including archival documents, images, monuments, and commemorative art. Through a series of comparative empirical examples, the workshop will discuss experiences of time as knots rather than lines and explore challenges of interpreting history on the basis of partial records and silenced stories such as stories of slavery and political dissent.
Wed Jun 15
2pm - 5pm
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.
Wed Jun 15
2pm - 5pm
It has long been recognised that diary methods are excellent for capturing people’s daily lived experiences (Bartlett and Milligan, 2020). Diary methods are particularly good at bypassing researcher/researched power relations as the power to document and what to document lies with the participant and not with the researcher.
Wed Jun 15
2pm - 5pm
The UKRI, which governs the advanced research academic sector in the UK, and is home to the Economic and Social Research Council have increasingly demanded stronger awareness of and practice around research integrity. In turn, research integrity is being 'understood' somewhat differently across the disciplines with some dominance of its translation into quantitative research.
Wed Jun 15
2pm - 5pm
This session will draw form a range of qualitative projects conducted in the UK based and with partners in the Global South to explore and discuss principles of equal partnerships, and meaningful community engagement.
Wed Jun 15
2pm - 5pm
This workshop will take participants through a range of different comparison methods in social science, ranging from the use of analogy and metaphor, through to more systematic methods such as Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA).
Thu Jun 16
10am - 1pm
This workshop will introduce examples of ethnodrama, composite participants and ethical fictionalisation to discuss broader issues of representation of diverse participants’ stories when working with qualitative data.
Thu Jun 16
10am - 1pm
In this workshop we will discuss what we mean by 'industry partners' and which partners may be relevant for participants' different research areas. We will discuss the value of engaging with industry partners, approaches to building partnerships and what success looks like with good partnership.
Thu Jun 16
10am - 1pm
This training course provides doctoral students with the necessary methodological tools for policy evaluation. While policy-makers are interested in the causal effects of policy interventions, a perennial problem that makes such assessments difficult is endogeneity, for instance due to reverse causality.
Thu Jun 16
10am - 1pm
This is an informative, fun and interactive session that introduces you to creative methods and offers guidance on why, when and how you might use them in your research. It starts with an introduction to creative methods and how they relate to epistemological and ontological positions.
Thu Jun 16
10am - 1pm
Want to become more involved with the private and third sectors? Keen to get your research disseminated in policy and media? Interested in producing impact outwith the academy?
Thu Jun 16
10am - 1pm
In this workshop we will look at how to make the best use of NVivo in your qualitative data analysis. We will consider which NVivo tools will be most useful for your PhD study and you will see how to set up an NVivo project. We will also cover how to code your data and where to find help when using NVivo.
Thu Jun 16
2pm - 5pm
We will provide a beginner's introduction to quantitative data visualisation using the statistical programming language R. We expect no prior knowledge of using R, this is meant for complete beginners, but more experienced users are welcome. Our workshop will be structured around a recent tutorial article from our department which provides an online resource for learning data visualisation using R.
1
2