Research Methods

Don't expect to actually learn anything practical about doing research in this part of the course. Really.

This is its official description:

The course in Research Methods will develop common research methods in the social sciences and will include, but not be limited to, the topics of concept formation, mechanisms and theory building, comparative method, case selection, historiography, dialectics, ethnography, genealogy, textual content and discourse analysis, qualitative interviewing techniques, field research and common quantitative analytic methods.

Research Methods is broken up into two parts each taught by a different person: qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative is supposed to expose you to the theories of knowledge that should somehow impact how you do research, and quantitative is supposed to expose you to the basic concepts of statistics.

Each component doesn't relate to global governance or diplomacy. The qualitative one has a sociological theory bent, while the statistics has a developmental economics bent. And math and economics has always scared me. I've taken economics, twice, and it still makes no sense to me. Math I could handle, if the teacher did a good job explaining it.

And there was something else that didn't exactly fit right with me about Research Methods. It was 'recognised' by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as providing students with a research background necessary to prepare them for doctoral study. In fact this was stressed again and again. So yes, I put that claim on my CV...

What is this ESRC?

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funds research and training in social and economic issues. We are an independent organisation, established by Royal Charter, but receive most of our funding through the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. Our budget of £181 million (2007/2008) funds over 2,500 researchers in academic institutions and policy research institutes throughout the UK. We also support more than 2,000 postgraduate students.

When there was talk of changing the exam structure due to the statistics complications which will be discussed in the next post, the head of QEH was adamant that it couldn't be changed, because of 'legal issues' and the ESRC recognition of GGD. My theory, though I don't have any evidence, is that QEH got some funding money from the ESRC as part of this recognition process. Somehow the Research Methods structure reflected the ESRC requirements more than the practicality of global governance / diplomacy and political science in general. Why go through all the trouble otherwise?

After this post, I'll do posts on Qualitative, Quantitative and finally the exam.