Teaching
Christine Rivers is currently a research fellow at the University of Surrey where she teaches Marketing at the School of Management and Advertising and PR in the Sociology Department.
She has also taught a nine month course called Introducing the Social Sciences at the Open University where she actively used the Census. Through study of contemporary UK society, this course provided an introduction for students from different areas within the social sciences, such as psychology, criminology, economics and sociology.
As part of the course objectives students had to understand how the Census is made up and how it is used. Students were also encouraged to explore other questions such as “how often should the Census be done?” or “how useful is it to have in the future?” in order to get them to think more critically about the instrument itself. Rivers mentions that students had to “understand what sort of information is collected and how we can make sense of it and how it has value to society.”
The Open University is characterised by having students from a wide variety of different academic levels and backgrounds and she mentioned that working with the Census allowed her to tailor the data and structure it in order to cater for such a varied audience.
Students in her course worked hands on with the data and they would explore relevant questions such as national identity, or methodological issues about data collection. To understand how to read and write the results, students would work with examples of housing situations in Scotland, Wales and England, and then had to interpret the results. In her own words:
“We were trying to look into what information is capture by the Census. How some of the criteria or the categories have changed over time and what has been added and why it has been added. So we were looking at what data has been collected and what can be collected in the future and what interest it could have based on the previous census. I remember there was a question about national identity, I can’t remember the exact wording, and they were talking about how that can cause some sort of conflict by the way it is phrased. So we were talking about these problems that may occur.”
Among the benefits of using real data Rivers mentions that, from a teaching point of view, “students can really see [what] it looks like, the layout of it, how the, let say, customer receives the information and reads it.” Additionally, she elaborates, it also helps students to understand how data gathering takes place and what a crucial process it is.