Slides from a presentation made to Society for Research in Higher Education (SRHE) Conference, by Sarah Lewthwaite, 8th December 2017.

1. The pedagogy of social
science research methods:
A textbook case
Dr Sarah Lewthwaite @slewth
Michelle M. Holmes
Society for Research in Higher Education, 8th
December 2017

2. SRHE scoping study: aims
• to make a significant initial contribution to deepening
our understanding of pedagogies that assist the
development of research capacity in higher education
• pave the way for future research on a larger scale by
analysing the pedagogies embedded in a substantial
selection of leading social science research methods
textbooks designed for postgraduate students and
researchers.
2

3. Why textbooks?
• Research methods textbooks are amongst the most
highly cited in the social sciences (Green, 2016)
• Resilient area of academic publishing
• Pedagogies of these books remain largely
unexamined
3

4. Scoping study: objectives
• Elucidate the pedagogies that are both implicit and
explicit within a diversity of leading social science research
methods textbooks.
• Determine whether and how methods textbooks foster or
incorporate support for experiential aspects of methods
teaching and learning.
• Stimulate dialogue about the pedagogy of methods in
research capacity building, to enhance the efficacy of
methods pedagogy for researchers, teachers, and other
stakeholders (i.e. textbook publishers). 4

5. Research Questions
RQ1. What pedagogical orientations, communication styles,
technical devices and supplementary online resources and
activities are employed in leading research methods
textbooks?
RQ2: How implicit and explicit pedagogies manifested within
these methods textbooks to guide the reader's learning?
RQ3: How do these textbooks foster or incorporate support
for experiential aspects of methods teaching and learning?
5

6. Challenging framing discourses:
Methods textbooks are criticised as being static, lacking
nuance, prone to error, conveying (only) procedural
knowledge, subject to commercial influences, divorced from
academic research.
See: Dixon & Quirke (2017); Best & Schweingruber (2003);
Hood (2006) and others.
6

7. Challenging framing discourses:
Pedagogic aspects of textbooks held to be in conflict with
innovation (see Kendell, 1999) and disciplinary content (Best
& Schweingruber).
Concern that some methods cannot be taught in the abstract /
in theory alone.
7

8. Methodology I
• Review 30 leading social science methods textbooks.
Selection on basis of:
– Authorship by pedagogic leaders (Lucas and Claxton,
2013)
– Methodologies relating to citation and impact (Green,
2016; Martin-Martin et al., 2014)
– Sampling to recognise a range of methods
8

9. 9

10. Methodology II
• Deeper consideration of 6 books.
– For further insight / theory building
10

11. Key themes
• Multi-facetted learning resources
• Use of active learning / learning by doing
• Use of pedagogic hooks – real world research
• Explicit pedagogy
• Engaging multiple perspectives and multiple audiences
• Emotional support
11

12. Bryman, 2015.
• Explicit ‘guided tour of
textbook features’
• Use of experience
• In text devices: ‘supervisor
tip’ boxes; ‘student
experience’ boxes.
• Pedagogic hooks: Research
in the news
12

13. Field, 2017
• Use of autobiography
• Use of humour, play,
fiction, narrative.
• Recognition of difficulty,
structuring content to
address readers at different
levels through ‘characters’
13

14. Miles, Huberman
and Saldana,
• Deep attention to
positionality of the authors
and authorial standpoints
• Rich reflexive language
• Explicit pedagogy
• Designed for diverse usage
14

15. Q & A
Sarah Lewthwaite
s.e.lewthwaite@soton.ac.uk
@slewth
www.pedagogy.ncrm.ac.uk
8th December 2017

16. References
Best, D. & Scweingruber, D. (2003) First words: Do Sociologies Actually Use the Terms in
Introductory Textbooks’ Glossaries? American Sociologist. Fall edition. P97 – 2003.
Bryman, A. (2015). Social research methods. Oxford university press.
Dixon, S. and Quirke, L. (2017) What’s the Harm? The coverage and etchis of harm avoidance
in research methods textbooks. Teaching Sociology. Doi: 10.1177/0092055X17711230.
Field, A. (2017). Discovering statistics using IBM SPSS statistics. Sage.
Green, E. (2016) What are the most-cited publications in the social sciences (according to
Google Scholar)? LSE Impact of Social Sciences.
Hood J. (2006) Teaching against the text: the case of qualitative methods. Teaching
Sociology. 34, pp. 207-223.
16

17. References II
Kendall Diana, 1999. ‘‘Doing a Good Deed or Confounding the Problem? Peer Review and
Sociology of Textbooks’’, Teaching Sociology, 27, pp. 17-30.
Lucas, B. and Claxton, G. (2013) Pedagogic Leadership: Creating Cultures and Practices for
Outstanding Vocational Learning (Winchester, 157 Group).
Martin-Martin, A., Orduna-Malea, E., Ayllon, J. M. and Delgado Lopez-Cozar, E. (2014), Does
Google Scholar contain all highly cited documents (1950-2013)? Granada: EC3 Working
Papers, 19, 25th
March 2015.
Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M., & Saldana, J. (2014). Qualitative data analysis: A methods
sourcebook. Sage.
17