This page is designed to help you find SWDTP training courses. The SWDTP offers flexible, collaborative, and responsive training in accordance with student need. Our training programme ensures a strong foundation, emphasizing theoretical and methodological understanding, and the flexibility needed by the next generation of social scientists to address key social and global challenges in their diverse careers.
Upcoming SWDTP / ESRC Training Courses and Events:
Dont forget, you can usually use your RTSG for part or all of the cost of attendance to training events.
Using administrative data for research: an introduction, 03/07/23, online
Dr Pia Hardelid and Dr Linda Wiljaars present:
Administrative data, sometimes referred to as routinely collected data, provide large and rich datasets for research. However, they require careful cleaning, management and interpretation. This online course is for those who are interested in whether they might want to use administrative data for research and would like a short introduction to this topic. The course will use administrative health data (national hospital inpatient data – the Hospital Episode Statistics database) as an example, but the principles apply to all administrative data.
More info: Using administrative data for research: an introduction (ncrm.ac.uk)
Cost:
Free
Website and registration:
Questionnaire Design, 05/07/23, online
Dr Pamela Campanelli presnts:
This live online course explores the art of writing effective survey questions and combining them into a meaningful questionnaire.
Have you ever discovered too late that your survey questions did not deliver useful or useable data? This course highlights ways to avoid pitfalls in the wording of individual survey questions as well as for the questionnaire whole. It also points out questionnaire design differences between face-to-face and telephone interviews, web and mobile web surveys and paper self-completion. Drawing on 30 years of the instructor’s experience and research findings from questionnaire design experiments, this course is full of practical advice.
More info here: Questionnaire Design (ncrm.ac.uk)
Cost:
£200.00 SRA members pay £165.00
Website and registration:
Introduction to Social Network Analysis, 10/07/23 – 11/07/23, online
Dr Paulo Serôdio presents:
To prevent obesity or smoking initiation among teenagers, who should be targeted in an intervention? How can we contain the spread of an infectious disease under limited resources? Who should be vaccinated first in order to be most effective during vaccination shortages? How can we dismantle a terrorist organization, a drug distribution network or disrupt the communication flow of a criminal gang?
Social network analysis offers the theoretical framework and the appropriate methodology to answer questions like these by focusing on the relationships between and among social entities. Unlike transitional research methods, we shift the object of study from the individual as the unit of analysis, to the social relations that connect these individuals. A network is therefore a structure composed of units and the relationships that connect them. Network analysis is about the position of these units, the overall structure and how these affect the flow of information.
The focus of the course is not so much on how to express these concepts formally through mathematics, but rather on how to use appropriate software to acquire measurements for these concepts in the data and use them rigorously in empirical hypothesis testing. The majority of the course will focus on descriptive methods of network analysis, but we will also discuss network-specific models and inferential methods for network analysis.
More info here: Introduction to Social Network Analysis – online (ncrm.ac.uk)
Website and registration:
PGR Residential, supporting your Research Journey ,18th and 19th July at UWE
UWE Bristol will be running their annual PGR Residential, ‘Supporting your Research Journey’ which is a two day intensive and highly rewarding event centred around skills development activities for postgraduate researchers. This will be held at the Frenchay campus, Stoke Gifford, Bristol and only in person attendance can be accommodated.
The full programme is still being developed by our colleagues at UWE, but you can find some details via this Eventbrite link.
There are a limited number of fully-funded places, but if you are interested, please apply using the Get Tickets link on the Eventbrite. You will be asked for a short statement of why you wish to attend this event, please complete this to apply.
This is a Summer School type of programme and not a writing retreat and will be led by UWE. The deadline to request a ticket is 8am on 30th July and we would expect to confirm your place very soon afterwards.
SWDTP Seminar Series: The Many Faces of Activist Research:
This seminar series explores theoretical, methodological, and practical tools for conducting what can be broadly defined as “activist research”. This is a form of research that challenges the traditional separation between theory/action, academy/society and is committed to producing knowledge grounded in and generative of social and material changes in particular places. There are many ways in which the intersection between these domains is understood and practiced: from “scholar-activism” and “militant research”, to “community experiments” and “participatory-action-research” and more. Through a reflective and inquisitive approach toward the concepts of research and activism, this series seeks to unfold the plurality of ways in which we can understand and engage in research-activism.
This series was recorded, a link to our youtube playlist containing each talk in the series can be found here
Introduction to mixed methods research, 04/09/23, online
Dr Sarah Jasim & Dr Ruth Plackett:
Want to learn more about mixed methods research? Need support or advice with your mixed methods research? Our online course could help you!
The ‘Introduction to Mixed Methods Research’ course from (Methodical) will be delivered by experienced mixed methods researchers Dr Sarah Jasim, a senior research fellow at University College London and London School of Economics and Dr Ruth Plackett, a research fellow at University College London.
The course will cover:
- Key principles and procedures in mixed methods research
- What is mixed methods research and why do we use it?
- How to plan a mixed methods research project.
- Understanding models of sequence and priority used in mixed methods research.
- How to analyse data and combine results.
- There will be opportunity to discuss your own research questions, methods, and desired outcomes.
Relevant for PhD students, post-docs and researchers across disciplines and industries.
Cost:
163.22
Website and registration:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/introduction-to-mixed-methods-research-tickets-617407090227
Any questions please contact swdtp-enquiries@bristol.ac.uk
PGR Skills training courses are available at each institution across the partnership. Details for each location are as follows:
Bath | Exeter | Bristol | Plymouth | UWE