Module Details for SOU33011 Researching Society (Part 1 MT) PREREQUISITE FOR SOCIOLOGY CAPSTONE

Module Code

SOU33011

Module Name

Researching Society

Module Short Title

Quantitative Data

ECTS weighting

5 ECTS

Semester/term taught

Term 1

Learning Outcomes

Students successfully completing this module (SOU33012) will be able to:

• Understand the mainstream quantitative methods used in published sociological research.
• Distinguish between different types of popular statistical techniques used in quantitative research.
• Construct and test hypotheses derived from social science theories using social survey data and statistical software (SPSS).

Module Content

The module Researching Society (SOU3301) provides students with the knowledge and practical skills necessary to pursue a wide range of social research. It serves both as a free-standing module and as preparation for students to conduct original research and complete a research dissertation in their Senior Sophister year. This part of the module (SOU33012) continues on from the Introduction to Social Research in second year, which covered survey design, sampling, data collection techniques and basic descriptive analysis methods. This term gives further instruction in inferential statistics for social scientists (lectures) and analysis of real empirical data (tutorials) using a popular statistical software package (SPSS).

Recommended Reading List

• Agresti, Alan and Finlay, Barbara (2014). Statistical Methods for the Social Sciences.

Optional texts on statistics, quantitative methods and social research methodology 

• Babbie, E. (2013) The Practice of Social Research.
• Goldthorpe, J. H. (2016). Sociology as a Population Science.
• Hoover, K. R., & Donovan, T. (2011). The Elements of Social Scientific Thinking
• Knoke, D., Bohrnstedt, G. W., & Mee, A. P. (2002). Statistics for Social Data Analysis
• Moore, D.S., McCabe, G.P. and Craig, B.A. (2017) Introduction to the Practice of Statistics.
• Treiman, D. J. (2009). Quantitative Data Analysis: Doing Social Research to Test Ideas.
• Wooldridge, J.M. (2016) Introductory econometrics: A modern approach.

Introduction to SPSS:

• Aldrich, J. O., & Cunningham, J. B. (2016). Using IBM SPSS Statistics. An Interactive Hands-On Approach.
• Carver, R. H., & Nash, J. G. (2012). Doing Data Analysis with SPSS Version 18.0.
• Healey, J. F. (2009). Statistics: A Tool for Social Research.
• provides appendixes for doing statistics using SPSS.

Module Pre Requisite

SOU22011/SOU22012

Assessment Details

Two pieces of data analysis coursework: Assignment 1 (40%) due in the middle of the term and Assignment 2 (60%) at the end of the term.