Every scholar has to write, whatever their discipline. Academic writing is always creative: putting words together to make sentences, sentences to make paragraphs, and so on, as nobody has ever done before.

However, in any discipline, some academics write more creatively than others.

This course will raise your awareness of the scope for creativity in academic writing, and provide you with the skills you need to use creative techniques in ways that will make your academic writing more engaging and accessible for your readers.

This intermediate level course offers a hands-on introduction to creative approaches to doing qualitative research. The course is taught by a members of the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives. The various stages of research will be covered, from data collection and analysis through to writing with qualitative data.  

This course offers an introduction to digital methods and practical experience of how to use a range of digital tools, techniques, and software to study culture and society. Participants will explore how digital methods and methodologies have shifted and changed over time, including their affordances and limitations. 

This is an introductory course to Social Network Analysis (SNA) and is available online or in-person. It will cover the concepts, methods and data analysis techniques of SNA. The course will be hands on and largely based around the use of UCINET software, giving participants experience analyzing real social network data. No prior knowledge of social network analysis is assumed for this course.

This in-person course is designed for those who would like to develop introductory knowledge of social network analysis (e.g. and learn how to compute SNA measures) before developing an understanding of the use of SNA for mixed methods research.

You will join other in-person attendees on the ‘Introduction to SNA’ course Monday - Wednesday (1^st-3^rd July) before joining attendees on the ‘mixed methods in SNA’ course on the Thursday morning (4^th July) for the remaining 1.5 days.

Social Network Analysis that uses mixed methods is gaining momentum. In this course participants will learn how to mix qualitative methods with quantitative analysis of social networks and critically evaluate studies.

This course seeks to support qualitative researchers in dealing with the key concepts of positionality and reflexivity. During the course attendees will explore the role of the researcher at the insider/outsider divide as well as experience and practise practical strategies and exercises to learn how to "do" reflexivity. 

Qualitative Interviewing:  A critical but friendly introduction to the what, how and why of qualitative interviewing.

This course encourages a critical but friendly approach to qualitative interviewing where participants are encouraged to think critically about the role of qualitative interviews in their research, their own role in data collection and the nature of the data generated in interviews.  This course will raise awareness of the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of qualitative interviews by asking participants to position their own approach in relation to the different philosophical debates and think realistically about what type of data they can access using interviews. 

This course provides a comprehensive introduction to using NVivo to manage the data and analyse a qualitative or mixed methods research project.