Module Breakdown – Social and Political Research

Welcome to another module breakdown blog post! So far, I have done 6 posts in this little series on my blog. Essentially, I break down each module and look at it in detail so if you are doing this module, or something very similar, then you know what to expect!

You can find my previous module breakdown posts here:

Year 1 Modules

• Power, Freedom and the State
• Contract Law
• Legal System of England and Wales
• Legal Skills
• Britain: From Blitz to Brexit
• Public Law

Anyway, this post is going to be about my Politics module for first semester which is Social and Political Research. Without further ado, let’s get to it.

Content

Social and Political Research is a module that’s all to do with the various research methods that exist. It essentially goes through as if you were doing a research project, from the beginning to the end. I think it builds well on everything I did in terms of research methods in A Level Sociology. We looked at why people might decide to do research on a particular topic, why certain methods may be more suitable for a topic than others, and started to think about our dissertations.

Some of the research methods we looked at were interviews, statistics, observations and more.

Lectures

Lectures for this module were once a week and were an hour long. Each lecture basically focused on a different research method, like focus groups as an example. There was no interaction within these lectures at all, which is what I was expecting in all honesty. The lectures were fine but I always felt like they went really slowly for some reason.

Seminars

My seminars in this module were a little bit different for me. Ordinarily, I’m used to these being a discussion about what we learned in different lectures. In the seminars for this module, they were to do with our two assignments. I’ll go into more detail about the assignments shortly but to carry on with the seminars, I found them very useful. It was good to have deadlines to work to for different readings that needed to be done.

The first half of the semester’s seminars were an hour long and focused on the readings we had to do for our assignment. After reading week which is like the halfway point of the semester, the seminars (now called workshops) were 2 hours long. These workshops focused on getting certain tasks done for our second assignment.

Assignments

As I’ve mentioned before, I had two assignments for Social and Political Research. This meant I had no exams to do which was very nice.

The first assignment was a critical review essay. Essentially, we were given four articles that focused on the same topic, and each article used a different research method to find out something about that topic. In the essay, we had to critically evaluate these articles and the methods each author had chosen. It was a fairly straightforward assignment in all honesty.

The second assignment was called a portfolio. In this assignment, we had to complete different practical exercises which involved different kinds of research design and analysis. I also found this to be relatively straightforward.

Overall Thoughts

Overall, I thought this module was okay. It definitely wasn’t my favourite module in the world but it was a straightforward module. I have already had my grade back for my first assignment at the time of writing and I’m pleased to say I got a first which is good. I do feel this was a really good module to have done in preparation for a dissertation as well.

And that’s it. Thank you very much for reading and I will see you soon for another blog post.

Beth