Hi TeachLingers,

This year is my first time running the undergraduate dissertation, i.e. the admin and 
assessment side of the whole thing, not supervising every student! I've come up 
against something which I thought was pretty straightforward but has quickly become 
complicated (sound familiar?). I've suggested that if students are planning to 
involve human participants in their study, then in most cases they should not rely 
entirely on people they know. They should use a sampling procedure to gather 
participants. This is social science after all, not friends-and-family science; and 
results should be generalisable to society at large (or a section of).

Justifiable exceptions I've been confronted with so far include e.g. small-scale 
ethnographies where insider access is a major component, child language acquisition 
studies where you could reasonably expect healthy children generally to acquire 
language in much the same way (plus similar issues of access and consent), very 
sensitive topics where prior relationships are important, and so on.

My generic response has been: that's fine, but you should still read methods 
textbooks about the method you're using, and justify your sampling method based on 
those readings. But then, for some students this is really the first time they've 
done independent research, and chucking them into research methods books can be a bit 
of a hike. I could always run a special lecture on methods (yay, another lecture to 
write) but then, the above responses suggest that generic answers might be missing 
the spot somehow.

So the question is how to balance general principles of defining and defending your 
sampling procedure (and your method more broadly) with sensitivity to the disparate 
range of topics, participant types, and research methods students are using. Any 
insights, folks?

One other unrelated bit of housekeeping, partly in response to one or two apparent 
misunderstandings: every subscribed member of TeachLing can send emails to the list 
([log in to unmask]), and every subscribed member is absolutely welcome to do 
so! Your responses don't need to be immensely thorough or rigorously referenced. This 
is a place to chat openly about teaching methods. Please feel free, now and always, 
to put in your two cents'/pennies'/other currency's worth!

Dave

--
Dr. Dave Sayers, ORCID no. 0000-0003-1124-7132
Senior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University | www.shu.ac.uk
Honorary Research Fellow, Cardiff University & WISERD | www.wiserd.ac.uk
[log in to unmask] | http://shu.academia.edu/DaveSayers

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