Your essay will introduce a research question and outline a quantitative research strategy, critically reflecting upon the relevant methodological dimensions of your proposed project. These include, but are not limited to, epistemology, validity, operationalisation, representativeness, generalisation, target population, as well as the social, political and ethical aspects of the work and their sociological relevance. You will critically assess the characteristics and suitability of your chosen public dataset to inform the methodological discussion. You will not carry out data analysis as part of the essay. You will provide a bibliography (not included in the word count), and use the Harvard referencing system. NB you also must provide a bibliographical reference for the secondary dataset you have identified. First, you identify a sociologically relevant topic that you want to work with in this module. Next, you formulate a research question relating to your topic that should be clearly stated. You will provide a brief rationale for the question. Research questions should have a specific focus, and be articulated as a question. Your question must have a clear Nottingham focus this might be because the issue you are interested in is specific to the city, or it might be looking at any sociological topic with reference to the local context. Think about the characteristics of Nottingham its demographic characteristics, its city status, the presence of two Universities, socio-economic profile, etc.You do not need a lengthy literature review on the research topic, but you need to identify some relevant items of sociological literature relating to the topic, to inform the rationale for your research question. The focus of the essay should be on critically presenting the methodological issues arising from your project, and the implications this has for the nature of the knowledge created by your proposed research. Make sure your reading covers methodological texts and that you make use of them when you write the essay.The justification of research question and relevance to sociology might involve you briefly outlining a key text which influenced your choice of research, and what the main argument is. About 80% of your essay should be about critically presenting the issues raised in designing and undertaking this piece of research. Guidance for choosing secondary dataset: You need to select an existing dataset that is relevant to your topic and through which you could answer your research question. You need to consider how your research concept is operationalised, ie what sort of practical indicator(s) are you going to select from existing datasets to carry out research on your topic?You need to pick just one dataset, but align this carefully with your topic and research question. You dont have to analyse this data statistically, but what you need to demonstrate is that you can critically appraise the methods behind the dataset. You need to understand how the data was put together, by whom, for what purpose, and what the characteristics (strengths and limitations) of that data are. To find datasets, try the following resources: https://www.ukdataservice.ac.ukhttps://www.ons.gov.ukhttps://www.nottinghaminsight.org.uk/ Some resources to include include are: **** https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=nMT7xt3CmgkC&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=social+research+philosophy+politics+and+practice&ots=44pJKMoV_B&sig=UMbZD3Nm3fddK11uCXoUxSIu2C8 **** https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=IjUdBQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR14&dq=social+research+sarantakos&ots=Pgk2EjNNsY&sig=XocNwCcN58kxN2qpLKuSZxnhGUk **** https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=0LwTtSDIJ_4C&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=ground+rules+for+social+research&ots=nrgJyhdiyK&sig=C3Zn_DvOdundg0HPUPI7dxyWFh0 **** https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=o5E5DQAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=research+strategies+foe+secondary+data+reidel+marc&ots=cF4HUgeFln&sig=BRMVslGxoa4UfT3ZiZlymgDQSvU
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