Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
CURRICULUM
Author(s): G. Payne, E.S. Lyon and R. Anderson
Source: Sociology, Vol. 23, No. 2 (May 1989), pp. 261-273
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/42853924
Accessed: 01-04-2019 11:35 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Sage Publications, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Sociology
This content downloaded from 14.139.60.17 on Mon, 01 Apr 2019 11:35:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
SOCIOLOGY Vol. 23 No. 2 May 1989
261-273
In his Presidential address, the immediate past-President of the BSA called for
more debate about the content of the undergraduate curriculum (Albrow 1986). To
large extent, a subject is what it teaches, and during a period of restructuring,
questions of development and direction become all the more important. We need to
know what to teach and why we teach it, if we are to have a clear view of what
sociology is and should be about.
Central to the curriculum question is the teaching of 'research methods', not least
because it is the topic that has received most attention in an under-researched field
(e.g. Wakeford 1979; Burgess 1979; Sociology 1981; SRA 1982 and 1985). The
inspiration for this attention has come from both inside and outside the profession;
from the demands of employers for graduates with the necessary skills to carry out
social research, and from the graduates themselves, from the promptings of ESRC,
and from the debate arising from the identification of the 'epistemological crisis'
(see Bell and Newby 1977; Payne et al. 1981).
The reviews of methodology in Sociology (1981) raised several central themes: the
relationship between practical competence and critical awareness, the role of
familiarity with research procedures and techniques, the position of quantitative
skills in the sociology curriculum, the problematic links between Theory and
Methods, and most important the implications of a growing awareness of the need
for 'methodological pluralism'. As noted then, such questions are importantly
related both to the nature and objectives of sociology as a discipline, and in a wider
sense to the kinds of things sociologists do in a variety of researcher positions in the
labour market. It is in the methodology curriculum that the training needs of
students converge with the knowledge needs of the discipline.
This content downloaded from 14.139.60.17 on Mon, 01 Apr 2019 11:35:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
262 G. PAYNE, E. S. LYON, R. ANDERSON
This last point is an important one. For the professional sociologist, 're
not a separate, specialist domain, but rather part of the practice of socio
contrast, the teaching of Methods has for a long time continued to treat r
if it were quite independent of other aspects of the discipline:
the similarities between the teaching of practice in 1979 and 1967/8 are strikin
is still a ghetto. (Wakeford 1981:509)
Methods
Following a suggestion by one of the present authors in 1986, the former CNAA
Sociological Studies Board set up a working party, chaired by John Westergaard, to
investigate several features of the teaching of sociology in PSHE. Part of this
exercise provides the basis for the present paper. A brief summary of the findings of
the working party is now available (CNAA 1988), but the present analysis of
research methods goes much further. The data base consisted of nine single honours
sociology degrees (one of which gave no syllabus), and twenty-one combined social
sciences degrees (five with no syllabus) in which sociology could be studied as a
major pathway.1 Four of the nine single honours degrees offered a four-year variant,
all including social research as one of the specialisations.
CNAA requires that each course is described in detail in a formal document (often
running to several hundred pages) containing details of teaching programmes,
reading lists, course structure, assessment procedures, cv's of staff, physical and
revenue resources, and philosophy of the course. A regular updating and critical
appraisal of the course is carried out, and reported upon, through peer review by
academics from universities and other polytechnics. Thus CNAA holds a library of
'definitive course documents' that can be fairly easily, if laboriously, consulted.
Data were collected by making rapid searches of the Definitive Course Documents
lodged with CNAA, identifying relevant pages which were then xeroxed, and finally
studying them in more detail.2 After the first two days of work, the authors
necessarily worked on the papers separately, having agreed a procedure for selecting
relevant items, and checking that this method was feasible. Thereafter the analysis
This content downloaded from 14.139.60.17 on Mon, 01 Apr 2019 11:35:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
UNDERGRADUATE SOCIOLOGY 263
This content downloaded from 14.139.60.17 on Mon, 01 Apr 2019 11:35:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
264 G. PAYNE, E. S. LYON, R. ANDERSON
Course Content
Burgess and Bulmer (1981) noted that scepticism during the 1970s about
conventional approaches to methodology led to a reassessment of methods teaching
and the undermining of any common agreement on its nature. We identified this
supposed shift towards 'methodological pluralism' in the courses examined, albeit to
a modest extent. It seemed to the present authors that approximately one-third of
the courses could be said to be predominantly skills - (and in practice)
quantitatively-oriented, one-third were mainly concerned with the philosophy rather
than the practice of research, and one-third a combination of both approaches.
Given the terms of debate about modern British sociology, one might have expected
a larger proportion of courses in the second 'epistemological' category. Five cases in
this group consisted of documents dated 1983 or before. However, the more mixed
group of courses is more weighted to recent validation, and also includes more of the
single honours sociology degrees. We also noted that combined multi-disciplinary
courses have a stronger quantitative emphasis, probably due to the association with
psychology and economics.
This content downloaded from 14.139.60.17 on Mon, 01 Apr 2019 11:35:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
UNDERGRADUATE SOCIOLOGY 265
FIGURE 1
The Top Ten Methods Books
This content downloaded from 14.139.60.17 on Mon, 01 Apr 2019 11:35:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
266 G. PAYNE, E. S. LYON, R. ANDERSON
This content downloaded from 14.139.60.17 on Mon, 01 Apr 2019 11:35:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
UNDERGRADUATE SOCIOLOGY 267
This content downloaded from 14.139.60.17 on Mon, 01 Apr 2019 11:35:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
268 G. PAYNE, E. S. LYON, R. ANDERSON
Over half the degrees combined conventional lecture/seminar courses with some
form of practical experience. Where there are two years of teaching, the Year One
course is more typically conventional, with the Year Two containing workshops,
group projects, or practicals. In such cases, most Year One courses include statistical
techniques. The documents say little about how 'workshops' are arranged, what
kinds of material students are provided with, or what kinds of exercises students are
given to work on. Few courses treat such workshops as bearing a direct relationship
to project or dissertation writing. This may reflect the constraints of documentation
format, but without some elaboration it is almost impossible to tell which skills are
learned and practised, and which are merely instructed as part of a small group, in
reference to an activity or goal. As against this, there is a clear trend towards
workshop methods with over half of all the courses and three quarters of the single
honours degrees now using this method. Courses approved up to 1983 had only one-
third which involved students in a methods project, whereas two thirds of courses
revalidated from 1984 on contain a project.
Where the degree includes a dissertation great play was made in the
documentation of the opportunity to carry out empirical work. However, the
authors' experience as members of CNAA visiting parties is that in fact many
students treat the dissertation as an exercise in library research. The difficulties of
doing fieldwork are seldom tackled. Where documentary information on this was
available, which was rare, it supported the authors' prior judgment. This is clearly
an area for debate and review. Apart from one or two specialist degrees, the
dissertation is not treated as the culmination of the methods teaching, nor is the
second year work explicitly geared to be an integral base for the Final Year work.
This content downloaded from 14.139.60.17 on Mon, 01 Apr 2019 11:35:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
UNDERGRADUATE SOCIOLOGY 269
Assessment
The documents also include recent External Examiners' reports, indicating items
of performance and course content which have been debated with the staff teaching
the course, and details of assessment mechanisms. In view of the fact that twenty-
five courses reported changes to their Research Methods, it was surprising to
discover that only six out of the thirty had any External Examiner comments on
methods. In only one case did the External Examiner enter into detailed written
dialogue over Methods, while in another case a high failure rate in Quantitative
Methods was mentioned. No External Examiner's formal reports raise questions
about student performance in Research Methods in the context of the course aims or
overall priorities within undergraduate education.
The information on mode, relative weighting and outcome of assessment is less
complete than the other features discussed above. On the basis of about two-thirds
of the degree schemes available to us, it appears that Research Methods are often
given a lower weighting than other subjects, in particular in Year Two. This may
result from the actual mode of assessment: coursework is the norm for single
honours and mixed mode for the remainder. The trend noted by Wakeford in 1979
away from assessment by examination to that by various practical exercises and
projects appears to continue and most courses reviewed examined Research Methods
in a variety of modes.
This content downloaded from 14.139.60.17 on Mon, 01 Apr 2019 11:35:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
270 G. PAYNE, E. S. LYON, R. ANDERSON
Conclusions
This content downloaded from 14.139.60.17 on Mon, 01 Apr 2019 11:35:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
UNDERGRADUATE SOCIOLOGY 271
FIGURE 2
TEACHING STYLE
More emphasis on
QUANTITATIVE practical and/or
METHODS expanded overall
Expanded content content
on Computing and (8)
Numeracy
(13) i
PHILOSOPHY OF
SOCIAL SCIENCE
Reported problems
and/or reduced
content (6)
PHILOSOPHY OF QUANTITATIVE
SOCIAL SCIENCE N. METHODS
/ N. Reported problems
Expanded content and/ or reduced
(4) N. content
impor
contention that because methodology represents the essential practice of the
discipline, its development lies at the core of the subject. The health of Methods is an
indicator of the health of sociology.
Our survey of thirty degree schemes suggests several trends, not all of which are
either welcome or expected. On the one hand, most of what was suggested by the
surveys at the end of the last decade seems born out. In particular there has been a
shift towards practical competence and familiarity with procedures and techniques.
Two-thirds of research methods courses revalidated since 1984 have included project
work, the more formally-taught and epistemologically-focussed degrees tend to date
from 1983 and before. Assessment by course work suggests a more realistic
approach to skills acquisition, and no degree proposed any reduction in the time
devoted to Methods. These trends, together with clear evidence of a methodological
This content downloaded from 14.139.60.17 on Mon, 01 Apr 2019 11:35:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
272 G. PAYNE, E. S. LYON, R. ANDERSON
pluralism (even if this does not fully extend to qualitative methods) seem
greater coherence and sense of progress than some of the more pess
observations of Bulmer and Burgess (1981).
On the other hand, we are left with doubt about some of the detail an
of Methods as a whole. It is striking, for instance, that quantitative meth
receive wider coverage in joint social science degrees and that none of th
courses we examined treated multi-variate statistical methods adequately
the final year options in Research, and how are the good intentions to add
computing to be carried out, faced with a lack of physical resources, shortages of
staff time and an already crowded syllabus? Why, despite Methods' universal status
as a core subject is it given a lower assessment weighting, and why is it still
considered normal that the undergraduate dissertation - the single piece of
individual 'research' - should be nothing more than a long essay based on reading
in the library? Is there no room here for the qualitative methods, if the demands of
fresh survey research are too great to be practicable?
These issues are problematic because the
basic, underlying question that has to be addressed concerns the kind of sociology
graduates we are trying to produce. Once sociologists have some conception of what
sociology graduates should be and what skills they should possess, we can begin to address
other questions about teaching and the content of courses in all areas of the sociology
curriculum. (Bulmer and Burgess 1981, 588)
The absence of clear statements of Aims and Objectives reflects the absence of
coherence in sociology as a whole. Until there is more agreement about the purpose
of a degree in sociology, we can hardly expect the questions of competence to be
answered. The call for relevance, vocationalism and applicability is not the only
solution for sociology, but without the appropriate opportunities for learning, we
deprive our students of their choice to respond in their own way.
Perhaps the most disquieting findings of our survey is the continued isolation of
methodology in its narrow slot of a Research Methods course. While we recognise
that teaching on other elements of a degree needs to address substantive results, and
that there are many studies to be covered if students are to acquire an adequate
knowledge base, the means and processes by which those results were generated
should receive more attention. Methodology is not a specialist topic: it is simply the
practice of sociology itself. So long as Methods are confined to the Ghetto - which
still is overwhelmingly the case - it cannot be properly understood by our students.
In this respect, we find ourselves echoing the conclusions of Bulmer and Burgess:
The future of methodology teaching will be determined within the discipline as a whole. It
does not lie with methodology teachers. As Bechhofer emphasizes, the tail cannot wag the
dog. Much depends too, however, on the health and state of mind of the dog. (1981: 589)
Notes
1 . No bibliographic references are given for quotations, and no institutions are mentioned by
name. This is not simply to protect anonymity in the conventional sense: the process of
This content downloaded from 14.139.60.17 on Mon, 01 Apr 2019 11:35:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
UNDERGRADUATE SOCIOLOGY 273
3. For a note on the need for caution in interpretation, see Marsh (1979), and Bur
Bulmer (1981:481-3).
References
Biographical note : Geoff Payne is Dean of Social Science at Polytechnic South West
(formerly Plymouth Polytechnic).
Stina Lyon is a senior lecturer in Sociology at South Bank Polytechnic.
Bob Anderson formerly taught Sociology at Manchester Polytechnic, and is now Social
Science Advisor for Rank Xerox in Cambridge.
Address : Faculty of Social Science, Polytechnic South West, Drake Circus, Plymouth PL4
8AA.
This content downloaded from 14.139.60.17 on Mon, 01 Apr 2019 11:35:45 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms