Accessing participants for research projects is often treated as unproblematic. However the experience outlined here of negotiating access to participants within a community setting illustrates the inherent difficulties of recruitment. The authors describe the techniques used and practical challenges faced when accessing participants within a socially deprived community for a qualitative research project on social capital. They used a number of different strategies to generate a diverse sample including advertising, snowballing, accessing gatekeepers, and street surveys. The value of a stakeholder analysis is described alongside issues surrounding the use of gatekeepers. Rather than acting as outsiders seeking participants at every available opportunity, a more fortuitous strategy involved the ethnographic approach of "being there" as active contributors to community life. Here, the cornerstones of credibility and trust were addressed in a process of continually negotiating access from a semi-insider position.

Initiatives, like the UK ESRC's RDI/CI programmes and the Q-Step Centres, have a long-term aim of addressing the well-documented decline in the pool of academics able and willing to teach quantitative methods (QM). However, these initiatives will take time to make an impact; therefore, the upskilling of current staff is a vital strategy if we want to maintain QM in curricula. This paper draws on findings from the ESRC RDI project, 'No More Pointy Clicky, numbers stuff; building staff quantitative skills'. This project focussed on upskilling staff in a large Sociology department. The project was committed to delivering training to develop staff competence in QM; however, it became clear that this alone would not be sufficient to build staff confidence. Therefore, the project rolled-out a more complex strategy that addressed a range of central issues, including, pedagogy, infrastructure, Departmental resourcing and strategy, and staff worldviews, which this article explores.

No abstract

No abstract

The issue of poor statistical literacy amongst undergraduates in the United Kingdom is well documented. At university level, where poor statistics skills impact particularly on social science programmes, embedding is often used as a remedy. However, embedding represents a surface approach to the problem. It ignores the barriers to learning that students bring to class, which may not always be addressed solely through embedding, such as, mathematics anxiety. Instead, embedding can only work within a much deeper pedagogic model that places students at its heart, as active participants in learning. This paper examines the development of such a model within a large sociology programme, where there was an implementation of a range of pedagogic strategies to support the development of students’ statistical literacy. First published May 2017 at Statistics Education Research Journal Archives