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Why SRM?

What motivates SRM students? What sorts of interests and goals might lead someone to pursue a degree in Social Research Methods?

 

Generally speaking, SRM students would have had some background familiarity, from coursework or practice, with educational and social science issues and research. An SRM student would be interested in developing proficiency with the various methods one uses to conduct educational and social research and interested, as well, in thinking hard about those methods, what they enable one to do, what their limits might be, how one could creatively combine them to study complex social problems. We think of education as a pervasive enterprise. Most social programs-- welfare, public health, policy, etc., seek to "educate" a particular constituency. SRM training provides the range of methodological perspectives and techniques that enable one to study or to evaluate such programs.

Educational Research Issues:
Consider, for example, issues from formal education-- issues which could easily be extended to other fields of inquiry. Questions of primary importance in studies of new educational policies and programs often center on patterns of change in various skills, behaviors and attitudes over time. For example, in studying the effectiveness of several interventions for first-graders who are at-risk for failure in reading, questions such as the following may arise: Which of the interventions tends to result in faster rates of student progress in reading? How do differences among children in their home environments and prior educational experiences relate to differences in their rates of progress? What happens once the interventions come to an end? Do rates of progress for certain students tend to decline? Do those students who participated in a particular intervention continue to make rapid progress?

Questions concerning change over time are also central in efforts to study and monitor the performance of educational systems: During which grades does student growth in achievement appear to be most rapid? Do we tend to see slumps or spurts in student progress in particular grades? How do differences in school policies and practices relate to differences in rates of student progress?

There is also growing awareness among researchers and policymakers that new curricula or social interventions may be highly effective under certain conditions but not others, or work well for some individuals but not others. Thus, for example, in addition to learning whether an innovative mathematics curriculum is more effective, on average, than a more traditional mathematics curriculum, questions such as the following arise: To what extent does the effectiveness of the new curriculum vary across classrooms and schools? Does the new curriculum appear to be highly effective when implemented in particular ways? Do certain students appear to benefit more from the new curriculum than others? What do we know about students who go about the learning process and interact wtih each other?

Efforts to address questions such as these can be approached in various ways. Researchers should always be mindful of the broad range of methodological possibilities. Those with a strong interest in quantitative methods may consider the use of advanced analytic techniques, in particular structural equation models and hierarchical models and complex interactions between many variables, which call for multivariate modeling involving latent variables. Those more inclined towards qualitative methods may see important research possibilities by intensive study using ethnographic methods or discourse analysis.

Such work would entail the consideration of a range of methodological perspectives and techniques and a variety of questions about social impact. Finally, as the student begins to consider communicating the work he or she is doing to others-to faculty, to peers at a conference, to a school district or public agency-questions arise about writing to different audiences for different purposes. The SRM emphasis will provide the training necessary to respond to this range of issues.

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What is SRM Training?
SRM training generally does not involve developing new methods like, for example, a theoretical statistician or an anthropologist might, but does involve more than routine data analysis. It does not require in-depth knowledge of a particular substantive area, but does require understanding of substantive concerns in education and/or other social policy areas. Graduates of the program are trained in methodology within the context of education (broadly defined). By knowing enough about methodology, they are able to suggest novel applications and extensions of existing methods that can help to better answer substantive research questions. There is an increasing need for such methodologists given the rapid development of ever-more complex new techniques, software and increasingly more expensive data collection efforts. The training provided in the SRM emphasis prepares students for this type of bridging role with the aim of enhancing the type of research endeavors exemplified in our earlier descriptions.

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