Methods

At the forefront of methodological research

Our researchers are at the forefront of methodological research and are building methods capacity in Edinburgh and nationwide. This is evident in our leadership of The National Centre for Research Methods and our central role in the establishment of the Q-step initiative, which has achieved a renaissance of quantitative methods in British sociology.

Likewise, advances in digital and data-driven methods are nurtured by the University of Edinburgh's Centre for Data, Culture and Society.

We have also led on promoting the combining of methods, through the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science's When Methods Meet initiative. Members of this cluster also provide influential contributions to debates about theoretical methods.

Major projects include the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded Data Science - Training and Capacity Building and a lead role in the Scottish Consortium of the ESRC Centre for Population Change (Phase II).

Sociology staff also make a major contribution to the recently established Research Training Centre in the School of Social and Political Science.

Research Training Centre

Research staff

Relevant publications

Some of our key publications are listed below. For more detailed lists please visit our personal pages on People.

Roxanne Connelly and Vernon Gayle, 2019. An investigation of social class inequalities in general cognitive ability in two British birth cohorts. The British Journal of Sociology, 70(1), pp.90-108.

Graham Crow, 2020. Collaborative research and the emotions of overstatement: four cautionary tales but no funeral. Global Discourse: An interdisciplinary journal of current affairs, 10(1), pp.41-60.

Emma Davidson and Lynn Jamieson (with Susie Weller and Rosalind Edwards), 2019. Big data, qualitative style: a breadth-and-depth method for working with large amounts of secondary qualitative data. Quality & Quantity, 53(1), pp.363-376.

Stephen Kemp (with Christoforos Bouzanis), 2019. Residuality and inconsistency in the interpretation of socio-theoretical systems. Sociological Theory, 37(3), pp.282-292.

Niamh Moore and Liz Stanley (with Andrea Salter and Maria Tamboukou), 2017. The Archive Project: Doing Archival Research in the Social Sciences, London: Routledge.

Kevin Ralston, 2020. ‘Sociologists Shouldn’t Have to Study Statistics’: Epistemology and Anxiety of Statistics in Sociology Students. Sociological Research Online, 25(2), 219–235.