Module Catalogue 2024/25

Pre Requisite Comment

N/A

Co Requisite Comment

N/A

Aims

This module aims:
- To deepen students’ knowledge and understanding of critical scholarly skills with an emphasis on designing research, conducting it, and analysing data collected with focus on what can be known and how.
- To provide diverse insights as to a range of qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods frequently used by those working in media, communications, cultural studies and interrelated fields to collect, gather and interpret a variety of primary and secondary data.
- To allow students to develop their own skills in research design by enabling them to put methods into practice.

Outline Of Syllabus

The module draws on expertise across the Media and Culture subject areas to enable students to begin understanding how particularised research questions meld with different ways of thinking about and doing research. Methods that we may look at in the context of research in media, communications and culture include:
- Qualitative approaches
- Quantitative approaches
- Mixed methodologies.

Intended Knowledge Outcomes

Students successfully completing the module should be able to:
1. Demonstrate knowledge of a range of qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods and how these methods might be used to better understand particular media and cultural phenomena.
2. Understand the differences and similarities between qualitative, quantitative and mixed approaches to collecting and analysing primary and secondary data.
3. Provide an understanding of how research can solve problems or contribute answers to questions relevant to media, communications and cultural studies today.

Intended Skill Outcomes

Students successfully completing the module should be able to:
1. Think through the components necessary to putting qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods into practice.
2. Reflect critically on, and engage with, relevant academic texts concerning different types of methods and methodologies from across media and culture subject areas.
3. Judge the relevance of a given method or methodological approach relative to the identification of a particular research concern.

Teaching Rationale And Relationship

Lectures: These will be used to introduce students to a given method and associated methodological issues in research. They will also provide students a formal introduction to the different kinds of research practices aligned with their area of study.

Small-Group Teaching: This provides practice-based skills sessions geared towards enabling students to develop skills in designing and undertaking research.

Assessment preparation and completion: This category enables students to complete their assessments.

Guided independent study: This broad category refers to independent student work and covers a range of activities. These activities can include reading and preparation as well as the development of supplemental skills associated with a method or set of methodological approaches.

Assessment Rationale And Relationship

Assessment 1 is a research ‘outline’ (1000 words) comprising of aim, objectives and research questions together with a short statement as to academic literature that has informed the above.

Assessment 2 (1500 words) ‘methodology’, including details of the approach and method(s) used to answer the research questions devised in Assessment 1.

Together, these two assessments offer an opportunity to apply the skills and knowledges associated with different methods and provide the basis for the development of third-year projects.

General Notes

N/A