Year 3 course units

Q-Step units are listed by degree, but can usually be taken as options in other courses too.

Crime Mapping: An Introduction to GIS and Spatial Analysis

This unit provides an introduction to the use of geographic information systems for crime analysis and research.

Combining the study of theory and research on the social geography of crime, while gaining practical skills in the use of geographic information systems and spatial data analysis software.

Quantitative Research Methodology

You will gain hands-on experience in approaching linguistic data using quantitative and experimental research methods.

Topics include basic statistical analysis and hypothesis testing, corpus-based research, fundamental principles of experimental design, and specific experimental paradigms common to linguistic research.

Changing Social Attitudes

This exciting and innovative unit will bring together sociological theory, empirical data, quantitative and qualitative research methods to look at trends in social attitudes in Britain over the past 30 years.

You will draw on a range of learning materials, sociological theories, high-quality secondary data, and collecting your own data to interpret, contextualise and analyse trends in British social attitudes over the past three decades.

Each week, we will discuss a different issue, such as attitudes to ethnicity, social class or the internet, and how attitudes have developed over time.

Advanced Social Network Analysis

You will learn approaches that permit you to test if theoretical ideas about social interaction are supported by what people, organisations and countries actually do.

The unit is structured around theoretical concepts such as cohesion, embeddedness, homophily, transitivity, the Mathew effect, structural holes, influence, selection.

You will examine these both from the perspective of how they structure the network and how the network effects structure behaviour, opinions and beliefs.

Modelling Social Inequality

This unit introduces the concepts, theory and application of two important statistical modelling techniques in social science - multiple regression and logistic regression.

You will also learn related concepts such as social interaction and social distance.

Theory and Method in Demography

You will learn the basic techniques of demographic analysis, that enables you to critically interpret demographic data and analysis.

You will be introduced to the range of data used in demographic analysis and the theory underlying demographic processes and their measurement.