Teaching
Brian Squire, currently a Reader at the School of Management, teaches the Research Methods course to second year Business Management students at the University of Bath and his class focuses on use of secondary data. The overall aim of the course is that it seeks to prepare the students for their Final Year Projects in which students can generate their own data or reuse already available datasets. As he described it:“[The students] have to collect, set up their own project and develop a research report. They generally generate their own data but I show them secondary data in case they want to use it and a few actually use it.” For the class students do some basic statistical analysis and then look at examples of secondary data such as the Workplace Employee Relations Survey. This dataset provides data on the state of workplace relations and employment practices in Britain and contains questions covering a wide range of issues that deal with the employment relationship.
Squire mentions that it is important for students to be aware that they do not always need to go and gather their own data because there is a wide range of secondary datasets available that already answers his student’s research questions He elaborates that research methods is always a challenging class to teach because students have a hard time linking it to their degree but that once they see the breadth of possible data that has already been gathered they tend to respond more positively.