Undergraduate Module Descriptor

SOC2050: Knowing the Social World

This module descriptor refers to the 2023/4 academic year.

Sessions will consist of lectures with question/answer and discussion, hands-on workshops and tutorials linked to honing research techniques.

From year to year, the module’s precise content may vary. The syllabus will cover some or all of the following topics::

Introduction: Knowing the Social (perception and reality; epistemology and ontology; meaning; framing; ethics)
Unobtrusive measures (physical traces; oblique perspectives, the ‘light footprint’, archives and numbers)
Survey methods, sampling and questionnaire design
Online methods of data collection
Textual methods (poetics and metaphor, style, content, narrative and discourse analysis, voice)
Talk and spoken discourse (personae, turn-taking, cueing and discourse strands and registers, ensemble)
Interviews and focus groups (performance, leading, prompting, the self-effacing interviewer, what we say vs what we do?, cueing, follow-up, the micro-macro link)
Ethnography and Participant Observation (materiality, embodiment, practice, setting, scenes, organisations, ethnomethods, experience)

This table provides an overview of how your hours of study for this module are allocated:

Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activities	Guided independent study	Placement / study abroad
22	128	0

...and this table provides a more detailed breakdown of the hours allocated to various study activities:

Category	Hours of study time	Description
Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activity	11	11 lectures x 1 hour each
Scheduled Learning and Teaching Activity	11	Tutorials 1 hour each week
Guided Independent study	84	Reading set texts and wider reading to inform formative assessment items
Guided Independent study	84	Application of data collection /analysis for essay preparation

This module has online resources available via ELE (the Exeter Learning Environment).