Social Capital Research Design and Methods

• Are you conducting research on social capital?
• Would you like to discuss or get some help with your research design?
• Do you have any problems or challenges with your research design?

These sessions are a supportive way to learn more about social capital research design and methods. You can connect with people, ask questions, get advice, and discuss ideas or issues.

Who is this for?

Although this workshop is focused on PhD students, we welcome anyone conducting research on social capital.

Who will run the workshop?

Beverly Sloan has a PhD in Organisational Leadership from The Chicago School of Professional Psychology. She is a veteran of the United States Air Force with more than 32 years of service. Her leisure activity includes mentoring masters and doctoral candidates on research practices.

How will the session work?

In these sessions, we aim to discuss the research process. This includes defining research; discussing research significance, problems, and purposes; examining your worldview and philosophical stance; developing research questions, sub-questions, and hypotheses; and your theoretical or conceptual framework. We will discuss the initial literature review and its purpose in helping you build your initial central research question. We will use the initial research question to guide the preliminary literature review. During the preliminary literature review, we will consider defining your key concepts and how they will drive your overall literature review. As we discuss the literature review, the goal is to refine the research question, identify gaps in the literature, and focus the literature review on the central aspects of your research question. This should also help us develop a good outline for our literature review and identify variables or sub-research questions. Once we understand how the literature review shapes our study, we will move on to research methods and design or our roadmap for collecting data. Then we will move on to data analysis and conclude by combining all the pieces. This will not be a linear process, but it will be a process.

Access requirements

We seek to make our events accessible, and this is no exception. If there is something that will help you to engage more effectively in this session, please email us on: events@intsocialcapital.org. Sometimes, it’s the small things that make a big difference, so do email us if you have an access request. We recognise that not all participants are able to attend all sessions for the full duration. You are free to join us and leave at any time during the session. We request that you have your name on Zoom (this can be just a first name) to make it easier for us to facilitate the session and address participants correctly. It helps to have cameras on, but we recognise that sometimes this isn’t possible, for a variety of reasons.