Sociology Factsheets: To Buy or DIY?
Like all good ideas, this one is simple but effective. Distil topic notes into key knowledge points, add illustrative examples and brief overviews of advantages and disadvantages, throw in some exam tips and short “test yourself” questions, call it a factsheet and sell it at a very reasonable price to teachers – which is exactly […]
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7 Sims in 7 Days – Day 6: For My Next Trick…
This sim involves a bit of very gentle trickery on your part as you use your little-known ability to mind-read as a way of enlivening some of the “possibly less interesting?” aspects of research methods. As with some of the other sims in the series this is a building-block resource; while it’s not very useful, […]
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7 Sims in 7 Days – Day 4: The Anomie Within
This short (5 – 10 minute) sim can be used whenever you want to introduce the concept of anomie, such as if you’re introducing Merton’s Strain Theory or looking at Garfinkel’s breaching experiments. The package includes a little bit of background on breaching experiments and a couple of different anomie variations – mild and strong […]
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7 Sims in 7 Days – Day 3: Window Shopping / The Art of Walking
Although these are two different sims I’ve included them together because both involve thinking about the “rules of everyday social interaction”, albeit in different ways: Window shopping is designed to encourage students to think systematically about the “underlying rules” of relatively mundane behavior. It can be used to simulate sociological research (such as field experiments […]
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Seven Sims in Seven Days: The Introduction
I’ve long been interested in the idea of using simulations (and games – see Disclaimer below) as teaching tools – there were a couple of online efforts I created many moons ago when the Internet was still young and frames seemed such a good idea: Education and Differential Achievement: The Sociological Detective was an attempt […]
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Weekly Digest
All the links that caught our eye this past week in one handy post… Sociology Education Methods in Context Mark Scheme I’ve seen the future and it doesn’t look good: “I Teach At A For-Profit College: 5 Ridiculous Realities” Crime Manchester’s Heroin Haters – Vigilante violence? Revealed: London’s new violent crime hotspots Chief Constable confirms […]
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Media Methods
One of the obvious ways to study the media is through Content Analysis and a classic – if now somewhat dated – application of the method was the Glasgow Media Group’s pioneering research, evidenced through a series of books – Bad News (1976), More Bad News (1980), Really Bad News (1982) – that examined “the […]
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Keyword Revision Mapping
Although revision techniques are many and varied one of my favourite techniques is based on keywords because it’s so highly-adaptable; it’s equally suited to on-course as it is to post-course revision (although I actually believe the former is both more effective and encourages a greater depth of revision). In basic terms keyword revision simply involves […]
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Methods in Context: Crime and Official Statistics
While the validity of Official Crime Statistics has long been questioned, their reliability has tended to be assumed. Recent pronouncements by the ONS, however, suggest that students should look at the reliability of crime statistics more critically…
