Methodology

About the Institute

The Methodology Institute is an interdisciplinary group with joint appointments in other departments in the School. The disciplinary backgrounds of the staff include statistics, sociology, social psychology, management, political science and bioscience.

In addition to the MSc Social Research Methods, the Institute offers a variety of advanced level courses, seminars and workshops in research design, quantitative analysis and qualitative methods. These are available for all PhD students in the School. Many departments in the School require students to take courses in the Institute as part of MSc (Research, MRes and MPhil) PhD programmes.

Staff and their academic interests  

• Professor Ken Benoit: Quantitative analysis of textual data for social sciences; world database of parties, elections, and governments; globalisation and party competition; domestic structures of European integration.
• Professor Martin Bauer: Resistance in social processes; public understanding of science; social representations, attitudes and public opinion; cultural indicators of science; psychology of action/activity; continuous measurement of moods, happiness and stress; computer-assisted content analysis; Eurobarometer surveys.
• Professor George Gaskell: Social and ethical impacts of technological innovation; risk and trust; qualitative and survey research methods; cognitive aspects of survey methodology.
• Dr Jonathan Jackson: Fear of crime; trust and confidence in the police; public attitudes towards punishment; the psychology of fairness, legitimacy and punishment; cognitive aspects of survey research; quantitative methods.
• Dr Jouni Kuha – director of MSc programme: Statistical model selection; models with measurement error; misclassification and missing data; latent variable models; social statistics.
• Dr Paul Mitchell: Building democracies from conflict; institutional designs to resolve ethnic and national conflicts; party competition, electoral systems and government formation.
• Dr Ilina Singh: Empirical ethics; families and children; paediatric psychiatry and psychology; culture and history of psychotropic drugs; neuroethics; enhancement; consent and capacity; pharmacogenomics; qualitative methodologies.
• Dr Sally Stares: Public perceptions of science; global civil society; surveys of public perceptions (opinions, attitudes, values etc); attitude measurement; comparative analyses of survey and similar data; applications of latent variable models to survey data.
• Dr Jen Tarr: Qualitative research methods, especially visual and sensory methods and ethnography; sociology of health and medicine; visual imaging technologies; somatic and movement practices, including Alexander Technique, Pilates, and dance.

Opportunities for research

The Methodology Institute welcomes applications from students for our research degree, both full-time and part-time.

For admission to the MPhil/PhD programme in the Methodology Institute, we normally require a good grounding in research methods at master's level. You should have an upper second class honours degree from a UK university or its equivalent abroad, and an MSc at merit level that provides a training broadly similar to our MSc Social Research Methods. Gaps in training in methodology can be addressed in the first year of registration.

Applicants are advised to consult the Methodology Institute website and identify a member of staff who might supervise their project before submitting an application. Any member of Methodology Institute staff will be helpful and discuss a potential application beforehand.

Applications should primarily identify a substantive area of research and also demonstrate a particular methodological interest, aiming at a methodological development: constructing a new data stream, new analytic techniques, method comparison, evaluation or validation, method critique, applying a new methodology, cost-benefit analysis of methodologies.

The Methodology Institute at LSE is catholic with regard to methodology: we support both qualitative and quantitative research, both stand alone as well as interesting ways of combining them.

When you apply for an MPhil/PhD, you will need to send us a brief research proposal (two to five pages) that sets out clearly the research problem you wish to investigate, explains why it is important, and describes the methods of research you propose to use, and your particular ambition for developing these. This will help us to evaluate your potential to embark on a research degree, and to identify a supervisor with similar interests and the appropriate expertise.

It is expected that a PhD in the Methodology Institute will be completed in three years of full-time study, with appropriate adjustment made for part-time study. Two supervisors are normally assigned to each research student at the time an offer of admission is made. One of these supervisors may be from outside the Methodology Institute.

Supervisors may recommend or require that students take courses that are deemed essential for their research. These courses may be offered both within and outside the Methodology Institute or the School, and may require examination.

All research students are initially admitted to the doctoral programme as MPhil students, until they are upgraded to PhD.

In the summer term of your first year, you will produce a 10,000 word research proposal, outlining the theoretical and conceptual framework, the aims and methods of your thesis. You will also give a short oral presentation of your proposal. The proposal will be assessed by the supervisor and two other academics, normally members of the Methodology Institute, who will judge the standard of the proposal to enable you to progress to the second year. In the first year, you will also take a portfolio of specialist courses as recommended by your PhD supervisor.

During your second year of registration, you will submit either three or four draft chapters of your thesis (which normally includes an introduction and focused literature review) or a short introduction, a literature review and one or two empirical papers (if you are pursuing the paper-based thesis). You should also provide a detailed plan for its completion for evaluation by an MPhil/PhD upgrading committee, who will recommend transferral to PhD registration if your work is judged to be of sufficient quality and quantity.

After the first year you will spend more time on independent study under the guidance of your supervisor. This will involve the collection, organisation and analysis of data, and writing up the results. However, you will attend the Institute's research seminars and other specialist workshops and seminars to broaden your horizon as a social researcher. You will be expected to make an active contribution to these by presenting papers and joining in the discussions.

Taught programme

• MSc Social Research Methods with one of the following options: Sociology, Social Psychology, Statistics, Social Policy, Philosophy, Government, Management, Decision and Policy Sciences, Development Studies or Population