The British Educational Research Association (BERA) have recently published a new position piece by Pedagogy of Methodological Learning PI Prof. Melanie Nind. ‘When the poor relation comes to town! Education’s contribution to social science research methods‘ is now available on the new BERA Research Matters blog. Melanie identifies difficult questions for educationalists relating to the field of social science research methods, and examines some of the socio-cultural factors that have lead to the current status quo. She begins:

For some time the development of research capacity has been a concern amongst strategic leaders seeking to build the UK’s research profile. As a co-director of the ESRC’s National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM), I feel this concern on a daily basis. Maintaining global competitiveness in a fast-changing data landscape requires ongoing investment of resource. To this end, NCRM has been charged with delivering a training agenda focused on increasing researcher competence in advanced and innovative methods. The goal is to promote methodological excellence in order to tackle fundamentally challenging research problems. Methods training delivered by researchers working at the cutting-edge has been identified as the vehicle to achieve this goal. For us in BERA this poses two difficult questions: First, why hasn’t capacity building been seen as a challenge requiring a strong lead from education? And second, what can we in education offer? …

Further reading:

Nind, M., (2015) ‘When the poor relation comes to town! Education’s contribution to social science research methods‘. BERA Research Matters blog.