Online Materials for Doctoral Students

Contents

  1. Ethnography Masterclass
  2. Careers for Postgraduate Researchers: Life Beyond Academia
  3. Academic Publishing and Open Access
  4. Getting Started with Blogging
  5. Exploring the Potential of Visual and Creative Techniques for Engaging Diverse Audiences and Increasing Research Impact
  6. What is impact in the social sciences?
  7. The Challenges and Benefits of Interdisciplinarity in the Social Sciences
  8. The Digital Scholar: How technology is transforming scholarly practice
  9. Carrot flavoured sticks: embedding evidence in government policy
  10. Developing Pathways to Research Impact
  11. How to get clear about method, methodology, epistemology and ontology, once and for all
  12. Getting Creative with impact: telling social science stories on TV
  13. Issues in Researcher Safety
  14. The highs and lows of engagement with and impact upon public policy
  15. Qualitative Research Methods: Data Analysis

Ethnography Masterclass

Dr Sara Delamont, Cardiff University

This is an Ethnography masterclass provided by Dr Sara Delamont, Reader Emerita in Sociology at Cardiff University.  Dr Delamont taught at Cardiff University from 1976-2014. She was the first woman to be President of the British Educational Research Association in 1984 and first woman to be Dean of the then Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences (1983-85).  Sara was awarded the John Nisbet (Lifetime Service) award by BERA in 2015 and the British Sociological Association Lifetime Award in 2013. 

In this workshop, Dr Delamont takes us through the process of taking fieldnotes and developing them into data. The workshop includes recorded videos for you to watch along with activities for you to undertake.  Completing the workshop will take around 90 minutes, though it can be done at your own pace and does not need to be completed in one go.

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Careers for Postgraduate Researchers: Life Beyond Academia

On 30 June 2022, the Wales DTP held an online training session on Careers for PGRs: Life Beyond Academia. In this recording of the session, we hear from Hannah Browne-Gott (Senior Social Researcher, Welsh Government) and Sam Hubble (Behaviour Change Project Manager, WRAP) about their own career paths and the research skills which led them to where they are today. We also hear Alex Houston, Cardiff University Careers Adviser, on options to consider within the social sciences beyond academia.

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Academic Publishing and Open Access

On 8 June 2022, the Wales DTP ran a 1.5 hour online training session on Academic Publishing and Open Access.

In this recording of the session, Dr Charalampos Efstathopoulos, Associate Editor for the Journal ‘International Relations’, talks about the peer review process from the perspective of the editorial team.  Next, we hear from former ESRC Wales DTP Postdoctoral Fellow, Joey Soehardjojo, on his own experience of writing an article and getting it published.  We then hear from Dr Elizabeth Brophy, Publisher for WILEY, who provides an overview of how to get published in academic journals, finding a journal, the peer review process and post-publication promotion and impact.

Finally, Helen Sharp, Scholarly Publications Specialist, talks about the benefits of Open Access, categories of Open Access and how to achieve them, and UKRI 2022 Open Access policy and requirements.

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Getting Started with Blogging

This course introduces the reasons why PhD students might consider blogging, looks at some tips for academic blogging, and addresses some of the practicalities and considerations in starting a blog.

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Exploring the Potential of Visual and Creative Techniques for Engaging Diverse Audiences and Increasing Research Impact

Dr Dawn Mannay, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University looks at opportunities arising from the impact agenda to move beyond the academic article.

Watching this video will take around 35 minutes.

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What is impact in the social sciences?

Bruce Etherington, Manager for Cardiff University’s Impact Acceleration Account, considers why you should care about what “impact” is and how it is relevant to PhD students.

Watching this video will take around 20 minutes.

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The Challenges and Benefits of Interdisciplinarity in the Social Sciences

Erin Leahey, Professor of Sociology at the University of Arizona, discussed “Prominent But Less Productive: The Impact of Interdisciplinarity on Scientists’ Research” with Wales DTP students at the Hadyn Ellis Building on 20 March 2017. This is a recording of her talk:

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The Digital Scholar: How technology is transforming scholarly practice

Professor Martin Weller examines the impact of digital technologies on academic practice.

Video recording of a talk at the ESRC First Year Student Conference in Cardiff, January 2015.

Watching this video and the associated media will take around 40 minutes.

The impact of digital, networked and open technologies has impacted upon every aspect of academic practice.  In this talk, Professor Martin Weller examines some of these impacts across different areas of scholarship and address the issues and opportunities raised by this tranformed practice. Digital scholarship should not be seen as a replacement to traditional practice, or in competition with it, but rather it offers an enlarged toolset for performing key academic functions.  Understanding the implications of these will be key to establishing a digital, academic identity, which will be increasingly significant for all academics.

There were a number of videos that were played in during Professor Weller’s talk; although we are unable to include them in this recording, you can pause and play them in yourself via the following links.

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Carrot flavoured sticks: embedding evidence in government policy

Richard Thurston introduces the role of social science research in policy processes, including evidence-based policy making. He considers the origins and theory underlyingevidence-based policy making and the challenges of implementing this in everyday practice.

Video recording from a talk at the ESRC First Year Student Conference in Cardiff, January 2015.

This video is just under 40 minutes in length.

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Developing Pathways to Research Impact

Two senior academics who were awarded an Outstanding Impact Prize by the ESRC in 2013 identify and discuss key ingredients for a successful engagement with non-academic audiences.

Video recordings of Professor Kevin Morgan and Dr Roberta Sonnino at the ESRC First Year Student Conference in Cardiff, January 2015.

You can watch either of these videos, which are each 35 minutes: each presenter covers the same topics and talks to the same slides. Or you can watch both videos to get a complete perspective on this project.

Four questions are addressed:

  • Why should we value impact?
  • Who are the non-academic beneficiaries of our research?
  • What kind of impacts can we realistically hope to achieve through our research?
  • What mechanisms can be utilized to involve our targeted audiences in the research?

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How to get clear about method, methodology, epistemology and ontology, once and for all

Video recording from a workshop by Professor David James at the ESRC First Year Student Conference in Cardiff, January 2015.

Watching this video will take just under forty minutes.

By definition, doctoral research is of high quality in the conventional senses of having a robust design, appropriate techniques of data-gathering and analysis, being original, having high ethical standards, having clear links with previous research and so on.  In the social sciences, good doctoral research is often reflexive as well: this may take the form of a straightforward assessment of strengths and weaknesses, or it may mean a stronger kind of reflexivity (such as that advocated by Bourdieu and some feminist scholars).

In this workshop, Professor James asks us to consider a further sense in which doctoral research on any topic can be reflexive and ‘critically self-aware’,  starting with the question ‘what’s the link between the concrete details of my method and more abstract matters, such as values and world-views?’  He looks at the necessary inter-relationship of four elements, namely method, methodology, epistemology and ontology, and some practical implications of this for the integrity and coherence of doctoral research.  The workshop is NOT designed for people doing philosophy doctorates.

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Getting Creative with impact: telling social science stories on TV

Video recording of a keynote by Professor Pamela Cox at the ESRC First Year Student Conference in Cardiff, January 2015.

Watching this video and the associated media will take just over half an hour.

Impact is about planning how your research will make a difference to the world.  Increasingly we are asked to demonstrate how the knowledge we create can be used to make a difference to people’s lives and communities.  How can social scientists tell their research stories in a way that better connects with the wider public?  What kinds of impact do these stories help to create?  The aim of this talk is to help you think about what impact means and why it is important, and how you can work to create the most impact from your project. Professor Pamela Cox shares her experiences of making two BBC documentary series – Servants (2012) and Shopgirls (2014) – both of which trace broad shifts in the UK labour market and in workers’ own lived experiences of these.

There were a number of videos that were played in during Professor Cox’s talk; although we are unable to include them in this recording, you can pause and play them in yourself via the following links.

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Issues in Researcher Safety

Professor Michael Bloor, Cardiff University

This course deals with ways of keeping physically safe and ways of coping with emotional challenge or upset. It also deals with institutional protections offered by universities – risk assessments, ethics committee oversight, insurance and counselling.

It has been developed by Michael Bloor, a professorial fellow in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, and is designed to cater for social science postgraduates undertaking or planning research on sensitive topics, or in hazardous environments.

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The highs and lows of engagement with and impact upon public policy

Dr Rachel Aldred, University of Westminster, introduces her research in the sociology of transport to talk about engagement with stakeholders and media.

Watching this video will take around 35 minutes.

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Qualitative Research Methods: Data Analysis

A masterclass with Professor Paul Atkinson.

If you work through this resource from start to finish, doing everything, it will take about 4 hours. You can of course take it in smaller steps and also repeat elements of it at any time.

Many people find working with data and generating an analysis from data to be daunting aspects of the research process. If you have collected data, but are wondering what to do with it, or are not sure how to set about analysis, this course will provide you with some guidance and some ‘safe’ experience using a particular approach. It involves working with some real data that has been edited and anonymised.

In the following video (46 mins) Professor Paul Atkinson discusses the principles and processes of analytic induction (sometimes known as grounded theory) and introduces the data that will be used in the exercise. This is derived from ethnographic fieldwork conducted by Julius Roth in a TB hospital in the American midwest.

Watch the video above, then put yourself in the role of a member of the research team analysing the data that has been collected. Look at day 1 and derive what you think are useful, plausible and productive lines of enquiry to develop. You can download the data as a PDF (140kb) using the following link.

The TB Hospital Ethnographic Field Notes by Julius Roth, edited by Paul Atkinson

Do:

  • Treat the data at face value (even though it is historical data and the
    treatment for TB has changed).
  • Focus on the texture, what¹s going on, and what we can think about as
    social scientists.
  • Try to find themes and potential research directions, rather than just
    doing content analysis.

Don¹t:

  • Focus on whether you like or dislike the people involved.
  • Conclude ‘It’s all about X’ or try to produce definitive answers.
  • Try to summarise and condense the data.

In the second video (60 mins) Professor Atkinson asks the groups, who have been spent an afternoon analysing the data, to identify various themes.

Watch the video and compare your own findings to those discussed among the group.