Course units

Q-Step units are listed by degree, but can usually be taken as options in other courses too.

Criminological Research Methods

The unit promotes a critical appreciation of the purposes and practice of research in criminology.

You will learn the intellectual roots of empirical enquiry, key distinctions and traditions in social research and the research process.

It also covers the diversity of methods and designs used at different levels of analysis.

Making Sense of Politics

This provides a foundation for the use of data to analyse political problems.

It introduces the idea of using data to resolve central research questions across the discipline, and the methods used to gather, analyse and interpret data used in politics research.

You will also be provided with the widely used data analysis software (SPSS and Excel).

Researching Culture and Society

This unit examines the process and practices of sociological knowledge production, and what is distinctive about sociological approaches to understanding and researching social life.

Providing a foundation for the study of sociology, and the core issues of sociological method and research which underpin many of the sociology courses, and readings, you encounter.

Understanding Social Media

You will develop your understanding of social research methods using social media data such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

You will gain basic training in the use of software for the handling and analysis of social media data, and develop critical skills in sampling, sample bias and statistical inference in social research.

Unequal Societies: Health, Wellbeing and Happiness

You will learn about accessing and using quantitative data and evidence with a focus on health, wellbeing and happiness.

Reviewing different data types and consider how to access and analyse such data.

This will develop your critical data skills and involve hands-on training and practice analyses of social survey data, using online interfaces such as NESSTAR and software such as Excel and SPSS.

Accessing and Understanding Data for Criminologists

This unit introduces the idea of secondary data analysis.

You will learn about the different sources of data which criminologists might access.

We teach the basics including frequencies and crosstabs, independent and dependent variable, levels of measurement and measures of central tendency. As well as one test of significance, chi-square and the concept of probability.

Introduction to Psycholinguistics

You will gain an introduction to psycholinguistics, with special focus on written and spoken language comprehension.

We will discuss the central topics and major findings of psycholinguistics, and the experimental methods used to investigate the psychological processes underlying language understanding.

Quantitative Methods in Language Sciences

You will learn the basic concepts of statistics through hands-on practice.

You will gain the computer skills needed to work with quantitative data and the critical thinking skills for conducting quantitative research in the future.

Variation and Change in English

This unit introduces you to the ways in which language can vary and the types of factors (internal and external) that may condition that variation.

You will learn about the effects of age, time, sex, social class, identity, geographical region, and internal linguistic factors on phonetic, phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactic variables.

As well as experiencing the different methods by which sociolinguistic data can be gathered and the statistical tests and methodology for quantitative data analysis.

How to Conduct Politics Research

This course allows you to develop research skills by preparing you to conduct an independent research project in politics, covering a range of different methodologies and types of data.

Essentials in Survey Design and Analysis

You will discuss the practical issues involved in the planning of surveys and topics involved in the analysis of survey data.

Taking into account the design of the survey, management, and handling of survey data from a range of social science datasets, exploratory analysis, comparing differences between means and proportions and chi-square tests for testing associations.

Research Design and Statistical Inference

This unit introduces you to the principles of collecting, summarising and interpreting data.

You will explore the importance of sampling and designing appropriate studies in answering research questions, and some of the debates surrounding making inferences from intelligence tests.

The Survey Method in Social Research

This unit introduces you to the social survey and its use in academic and policy research.

You will be given basic training in the use of SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Scientists) for the handling and analysis of survey data, and the critical skills to interpret and report analyses using survey data.

Market Research

You will gain a working knowledge of the basic techniques used in contemporary marketing research.

This involves being able to understand and identify secondary data sources (customer and area profiling), implement methods for the collection of primary data (surveys, sampling, questionnaire design), and understand qualitative marketing research methodology (focus groups).

Crime Mapping: An Introduction to GIS and Spatial Analysis

This unit provides an introduction to the use of geographic information systems for crime analysis and research.

Combining the study of theory and research on the social geography of crime, while gaining practical skills in the use of geographic information systems and spatial data analysis software.

Quantitative Research Methodology

You will gain hands-on experience in approaching linguistic data using quantitative and experimental research methods.

Topics include basic statistical analysis and hypothesis testing, corpus-based research, fundamental principles of experimental design, and specific experimental paradigms common to linguistic research.

Changing Social Attitudes

This exciting and innovative unit will bring together sociological theory, empirical data, quantitative and qualitative research methods to look at trends in social attitudes in Britain over the past 30 years.

You will draw on a range of learning materials, sociological theories, high-quality secondary data, and collecting your own data to interpret, contextualise and analyse trends in British social attitudes over the past three decades.

Each week, we will discuss a different issue, such as attitudes to ethnicity, social class or the internet, and how attitudes have developed over time.

Advanced Social Network Analysis

You will learn approaches that permit you to test if theoretical ideas about social interaction are supported by what people, organisations and countries actually do.

The unit is structured around theoretical concepts such as cohesion, embeddedness, homophily, transitivity, the Mathew effect, structural holes, influence, selection.

You will examine these both from the perspective of how they structure the network and how the network effects structure behaviour, opinions and beliefs.

Modelling Social Inequality

This unit introduces the concepts, theory and application of two important statistical modelling techniques in social science - multiple regression and logistic regression.

You will also learn related concepts such as social interaction and social distance.

Theory and Method in Demography

You will learn the basic techniques of demographic analysis, that enables you to critically interpret demographic data and analysis.

You will be introduced to the range of data used in demographic analysis and the theory underlying demographic processes and their measurement.