Teaching
Alleyne is a Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. Among his teaching responsibilities he undertakes introductory teaching support in quantitative methods at both the undergraduate and postgraduate level, the latter being part of the Sociology department’s ESRC Doctoral Training Centre.
At the undergraduate level he works with the General Household Survey series and uses it to get students comfortable using a large dataset and, as he describes it, “give them a sense of the scope and richness of large publicly curated datasets.” When working with postgraduate students he includes other datasets such as the United Nations Human Development Index (HDI).
A large part of his tasks include working closely with students at an early stage when they have to explore the datasets for the first time and explore the data dictionaries. This method is used to get students to think about how the information can be used. As he explains:”At the early stage they read through the material from the data dictionary and produce their own prose abstract wondering how is this useful to a researcher. Then they have to explore the dataset. The second issue is we ask them to do some simple descriptors either SPSS or Excel. From there we’ll move them to selecting and exploring relations between two variables and then we’ll move to simple regression”
Alleyne has worked extensively with the General Household Survey since he was a postgraduate student and has been using it for teaching, along with the HDI data during the last seven years. He mentions that using the General Household Survey has the advantage of students being able to personally relate to it. Moreover, he explains, students are assured that they are working with relevant data:”it makes it real for them…I think they feel that they are doing sociology. We make a point in saying that our data comes from the UK Data Archive and these datasets are the ones that the government works with, local authorities work with, social researchers and the private sector. There’s something about the authority of it.”
Dr Alleyne mentions also that students who have been exposed to working with real data are more likely to carry out statistical research after doing this course. In fact, he goes on to explain, “It meets a real concern students have: what kind of job will I get later. And they soon realize that it’s good on the CV and we’ve had feedback from employers saying that’s really important that students know that there is a UK Data Archive and to know what’s in it”