There are three key points that will be emphasised during the course.

First, in discussing social research, it is important not to neglect social theory. So much depends in social research on the initial definition of our field of study, and how we conceptualise key objects. For example, there are several units of analysis by which to examine society: individuals, classes, households, groups, men and women, communities, and so on. All such starting points are fraught with difficulties that shape the course of research long before ‘methods’ in the narrow sense of techniques for getting and interpreting information are chosen. Once these questions of conceptualisation are settled, then the range of possible outcomes of research is quite limited.

Second, traditional methods of explanation assume causation is a matter of regularities in relationships between events (e.g., correlating education (X) with income levels (Y)). However, social science has been unsuccessful in discovering law-like regularities. An alternative view put forward by realist philosophy argues that objects and social relations have causal powers, which may or may not produce regularities. In view of this, less weight is placed on quantitative methods for discovering and assessing regularities, and more on methods of establishing and evaluating qualitative nature of social objects and relations on which causal mechanisms depend (e.g., contradictions of capitalism and class struggle).

Third, social scientists are invariably confronted with situations (e.g., social events and relations in lecture rooms) in which many things are going on at once, and they lack the possibility of isolating out particular processes (e.g., economic relations, gender, status, class, spatial relations, and so on) in experiments. This multi-dimensionality is typical of the objects of social science. The task of assessing the nature of the constituent processes without being able to isolate them throws a huge burden onto abstraction.

In light of the above comments, we shall take a broad view of methods, which covers the clarification of modes of explanation and understanding, the nature of abstraction, as well as the familiar subjects of research design and methods of analysis.

We need to distinguish between method and methodology. Methods of research are the actual techniques or procedures used to gather and analyse data related to some research question or hypothesis. Methodology is the analysis of how research should or does proceed – how theories are generated and tested, what kind of logic is used, what criteria they have to satisfy, what theories look like and how theoretical perspectives can be related to particular research problems? We shall say less about methodology, though it is important.

The course also has several other aims. First, we shall investigate various qualitative research methods. Second, an exploration of how to design a good research that requires us: a) to have some knowledge of the deeper issues about how the world looks like – the research implies selecting particular concepts and ideas and making abstractions; b) to assess and judge what social actors tell us; c) to bring values and ethics into the project (e.g., feminist research project); and d) to have an understanding of what the ‘real’ world looks like. Third, we shall undertake a practical research project.