ESRC Research Methods Festival 2010: Draft programme now available!

The 4th ESRC Research Methods Festival, organised by the Methods Centre, will be held on 5-8 July 2010 at St Catherine's College, Oxford, UK. An impressive line up of presenters will speak about issues at the cutting edge of developments in social science research methods. The draft outline indicates some of the people who will be among these presenters, and the range of titles of the over 60 sessions. Further information about these sessions will be made available as the programme is firmed up. Bookings for the festival will open in March 2010.

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Call for papers: Mixed Methods in Psychology and Law in Criminological Research, International Journal of Multiple Research Approaches

Contributions are invited to a special issue of the International Journal of Multiple Research Approaches (MRA) dedicated to Mixed Methods in Psychology and Law and in Criminological Research. The issue will include papers on epistemology in psychological, legal and criminological domains, theoretical and empirical research experiences and commentaries on mixed approach in legal, criminological and psychological literature; examples of studies which have run qualitative and quantitative, as well multiple approaches are welcome; and challenges and emerging issues in combining innovative approaches and evaluation programs are also invited.

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New book: Teaching Research Methods in the Social Sciences

How can excellence in the teaching of research methods be encouraged and ensured? This question has become increasingly important following the adoption of research methodology as a core part of many postgraduate and undergraduate courses. There has, however, been little discussion about the aims and methods of teaching the subject. In this volume a number of authors from a variety of countries and disciplines employ their knowledge and experience towards the development of a 'pedagogical culture' in research methods. Their aim is to establish the extent of common concerns and challenges and to demonstrate ways in which these are being met.

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New MLwiN Forum

LEMMA, a node of the Methods Centre, is delighted to announce the long-awaited arrival of the Centre for Multilevel Modelling's own MLwiN Forum. The purpose of the forum is to provide a platform for MLwiN users to ask and answer questions about the software, and to build a greated knowledge base for the MLwiN users.

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How are we doing? Take part in the Methods Centre communication study - Win a Sony MP3 player!

The Methods Centre has now entered its 6th year and would like to assess how well we communicate with you and what aspects of our communication activities need developing. We are also interested in finding out about what kind of research methods related information you look for and how you go about it. This will help us to develop the Methods Centre resources and improve the ways in which you can access them. We would like to invite you to take part in an online communication study, which should take no more than five minutes for you to complete.

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NVivo 8 Introductory Day Course

11 November 2009
University of Surrey

NVivo 8, developed by QSR, Doncaster, Australia is a CAQDAS package which now integrates the handling of textual data with multimedia forms of information/data. The workshop is structured to provide step by step support for the some of the tools in NVivo. Exercises concern the coding and organization of the data, so that later interrogation of the data can occur in a wide variety of ways. Brief coverage of the modeling tool and an overview of longer term usage are also included. This one day workshop mostly concerns the handling of textual data.

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Conference on “The Measurement of Progress”

19 November 2009
The Royal Society, London

Post-recession, there will be a greater focus on sustainability to ensure that future gains will be longer-lasting. But what will be the new goals and how will progress towards them be monitored? These issues will be explored in the Royal Statistical Society Statistics User Forum’s annual conference on 19 November 2009. This conference will showcase the new wave of pioneers mapping out society and highlight the statistical issues that need to be addressed. Among the speakers will be representatives of the Sarkozy Commission and the OECD-led Global Project on measuring progress.

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Atlas.ti Introductory Day Course

25 November 2009
University of Surrey

ATLAS.ti Version 5.2, developed by Scientific Software, Berlin. is a CAQDAS package suited to the management and analysis of qualitative data i.e. text and multimedia data/information. The workshop focuses on ways to organise both the data and the project itself. We code the data, create memo's which centralise thematic work and writing, create networks which allow us to explore and visually express themes, our ideas about them and their connections with other issues .We aim to encourage the effective use of some of the most important tools available in the software.

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Workshop: Modelling Social Networks

27 November 2009
University of Surrey

There is increasing interest in social network analysis within the social sciences, primarily because it is a way of examining the structures of interactions between actors. While earlier forms of social network analysis were mainly concerned with building a static picture of networks recorded at one moment in time, attention has now turned to more dynamic analyses, in which the development of network structures is attended to. Concurrently, agent-based modelling, which enables the interactions between agents to be represented in a straightforward way, has become more interested in network structures.

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Reading and Interpreting Quantitative Research Syntheses: an Introduction to methodology

10 December 2009
Queen's University, Belfast

FREE one day introductory courses are to be held across the UK. The one day course will provide an introduction to the use of meta-analysis in education research with particular emphasis on quantitative techniques. The courses are organised by the School of Education, Durham University in collaboration with CEM at Durham University, York University and the Institute of Education, University of London. The course will be of interest to research students, research associates, academic researchers, research methods course leaders and those with a policy interest in interpreting research findings.

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Build-a-Model: Agent-Based Modelling

10 December 2009
University of Surrey

This "hands on" course is suitable for anyone who is thinking of designing and building their first simulation model. It provides an introduction to designing, specifying and coding simple models, and supervised practice. The course will also briefly review other parts of a modelling methodology, including formulating a research question, validation, and reporting conclusions. Course instructor: Dr Edmund Chattoe-Brown.

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Design and evaluation of questionnaires for survey research

10 - 11 December 2009
University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

This course will give an overview of the consequences of the choices which are made when formulating survey questions. Course participants are also introduced to a program SQP which predicts the quality of questions on the basis of all the information the course organisers have collected about the effect of these choices on the quality of questions. Errors will always remain in the questionnaires, which is why the strategies for coping with these errors in the analysis of survey data will be briefly discussed.

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Reading and Interpreting Quantitative Research Syntheses: an Introduction to methodology

15 January 2010
Cardiff University

FREE one day introductory courses are to be held across the UK. The one day course will provide an introduction to the use of meta-analysis in education research with particular emphasis on quantitative techniques. The courses are organised by the School of Education, Durham University in collaboration with CEM at Durham University, York University and the Institute of Education, University of London. The course will be of interest to research students, research associates, academic researchers, research methods course leaders and those with a policy interest in interpreting research findings.

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NVivo 8 Introductory Day Course

27 January 2010
University of Surrey

NVivo 8, developed by QSR, Doncaster, Australia is a CAQDAS package which now integrates the handling of textual data with multimedia forms of information/data. The workshop is structured to provide step by step support for the some of the tools in NVivo. Exercises concern the coding and organization of the data, so that later interrogation of the data can occur in a wide variety of ways. Brief coverage of the modeling tool and an overview of longer term usage are also included. This one day workshop mostly concerns the handling of textual data.

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FREE Mixed Methods Seminar

17 February 2010
University of Surrey

FREE Mixed Methods Seminar : "Transforming, triangulating and quantitising data – How CAQDAS supports data integration" Led by the QUIC Data Integration Researchers.

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Econometric analysis of scanner data

22 - 23 March 2010
London

A Journal of Applied Econometrics, Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) and Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice (cemmap) conference. Organisers: Rachel Griffith (IFS/UCL), Jerry Hausman (MIT) and Lars Nesheim (UCL/CEMMAP) Large scale data on household purchasing behaviour are now widely available in many countries. These data are collected by market research firms and contain information on prices and quantities purchased, along with detailed product and household characteristics. They are increasingly being used by social scientists, and open up many new avenues of research as well as presenting new challenges. This conference will discuss the latest research.

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Multilevel Modelling of Discrete Response Data

12 - 14 April 2010
School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol

This intermediate level workshop provides an introduction to multilevel modelling of discrete (categorical and count) data. We assume that participants are familiar with multilevel models for continuous response variables (to the level implied by our Introduction to Multilevel Modelling workshop or Module 5 of our online multilevel modelling course) and standard (single-level) models for binary responses.

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