MA Sociology

The  process  of  doing  social  research  raises  a  host  of  questions  additional  to  the substantive questions the research is supposed to answer. For example, questions about: knowledge and truth; the purposes of academic research; the nature and status of the 'objects' we analyse; our relation to and involvement in the world we are investigating; and the status of the knowledge of those we research relative to our own. Whether or not we are aware of and explicitly ask these questions, we inevitably make assumptions about the 'answers' to them in our research and these 'answers' shape our research. Better then to be more explicitly aware of the questions (and our assumptions about them) in order to arrive at answers of which we are confident. The primary purpose of Philosophical and Methodological Foundations of Social Research is to make some of these questions explicit and give you an opportunity to develop a reasoned response to them, allowing you to make important and informed choices with respect to your own research.

This course unit aims to:

• Improve students’ capacities to recognise and engage with a range of philosophical positions and methodological issues in their own research. 
• Develop students’ abilities to present their understandings of the complexities of these issues and of how such issues might shape their own work.
• Cultivate students’ confidence and competence at evaluating methodological arguments to arrive at an independent, reasoned and supported position  
• Further enhance students’ capacities as social researchers. 

The process of doing social research raises a host of wider questions, questions about: e.g. 
knowledge and truth (how we might hope to achieve them and how we know when/if we have (or have not)); 

• the purposes of academic research (e.g. Are we trying to explain things? Understand them? Criticise and change them?); 
• the nature and status of the 'objects' we analyse (e.g. What difference is there between studying human behaviour and the behaviour of plants, molecules or subatomic particles?); 
• our relation to and involvement in the world we are investigating (Does researching a particular social setting change it? Does that matter? In what ways do our own social backgrounds, as researchers, matter?); 
• the status of the knowledge of those we are research relative to our own (unlike the molecules which the biologist studies, the human beings whom we study 'know' their world and have ideas about why it works as it does). 

The course will explore different approaches to these questions and help you to develop your own stance on them, allowing you to make important and informed choices with respect to your research. We will explore works (about the nature of social scientific claims and procedures, regimes of truth and systems of representation, the objects of social knowledge and the limits to the 'social', as well as what constitutes social explanation) which explore the questions above from different points of view. 

An equally important aim of the course, however, is to allow you to further develop your skills of intellectual (and especially methodological) engagement, such that you are better able, both now and in future work, to address the many other complex methodological arguments and conundrums that we do not address but which you will inevitably face in your research. The course is focused around a number of key methodological essays, which you are expected to read and make notes on in advance of each session (one reading per week) and which we will then critically discuss as a group.

Weekly lecture/seminars

3,000 word assessed essay (100%)

Non-assessed 600 word essay plan (0%)

Information
The course consists of 10, 2hr classes.
Students are required to attend all classes for their duration