Advanced Qualitative Methods

Admission requirements

This course is only available for students in the BA Urban Studies programme.

Description

Advanced Qualitative Methods will equip students with knowledge and skills needed to critically engage with urban space. This class will enhance students’ data collection and analysis skills, but it also goes beyond the first-year methods training in that it emphasizes taking an interpretive approach, being attuned to the normative and political implications of research in urban sites, and presenting findings to a wider public.

Over the course of the semester, students will work in small research groups, applying a variety of methods to conduct neighborhood-based inquiry in The Hague. Groups will present the results of their research during a closing conference-style event that will be open to the public. Throughout, we will grapple with how to pose effective research questions and how to ensure a close connection between theory, urban inquiry, and pratical interventions. Students will thereby gain broad familiarity with methodological approaches, tools, and theories, and deepen their understanding of research traditions in Urban Studies and their foundations in fields ranging from philosophy and ethnography to comparative literature and gender studies. Through close readings of theoretical texts and hands-on research in urban field sites, students will develop as urban scholars who are socially engaged and well prepared to meet the challenges of twenty-first century cities. We will interrogate the implications of the commodification of urban space, how the boundaries between public and private (commercial) space and are becoming increasingly fluid, and how such processes reshape the urban landscape.

Advanced Qualitative Methods will prepare students to move confidently between the different disciplines that make up Urban Studies, but above all to take an interdisciplinary approach to complex issues and often disruptive challenges of urbanization that require taking multiple perspectives into account. Students will develop their critical sensibility through engagement with the humanities’ underlying ethical notions of who and what we are as human beings as well as more politically charged approaches to issues of urban change.

Course objectives

General learning outcomes

See tab Additional information for the overview of the programme's general learning outcomes. In the assessment methods below is outlined which general learning outcome will be tested through which method.

Course objectives, pertaining to this course

1) Students understand the interface between ideas, empirical inquiry, and citizen engagement as well as the importance of urban research for critical and creative efforts to meet the challenges of the contemporary city.
2) Students have learned how to apply advanced qualitative methods to understand contemporary developments in urban space.
3) Students are able to take abstract and critical ideas and operationalize them for practical research and critical intervention.
4) Students are confident and independent researchers who are able to devise, design and carry out a research project using a variety of qualitative methods.
5) Students are able to present research findings in writing and orally to an audience.

Timetable

The timetables are available through My Timetable.

Mode of instruction

• Tutorial (compulsory attendance)
  This means that students have to attend every session of the course. If a student is unable to attend a tutorial, they should inform the lecturer in advance, providing a valid reason for absence. The teacher will determine if and how the missed session can be compensated by an additional assignment. If they are absent from a tutorial without a valid reason, they can be excluded from the final exam in the course.

Assessment method

Assessment

• Midterm exam
  Take home examination
  -measured programme's general learning outcomes: 4-5
  -measured course specific objectives: 2-3

• Group research report
  -measured programme's general learning outcomes: 4, 7, 11, 16
  -measured course specific objectives: 1-4

• Oral presentation
  -measured programme's general learning outcomes: 4, 11
  -measured course specific objectives: 5

Weighing

End grade

To successfully complete the course, please take note that the end grade of the course is established by determining the weighted average of all assessment components, with the additional requirement that the midterm exam grade must be higher than 5.50.

Resit

If the end grade is insufficient (lower than a 6.0), or the midterm exam grade is lower than 5,50, there is a possibility of retaking the take home exam and/or the group research report, replacing the previous grade(s). Please note that grades can be improved by a maximum of one point.

Faculty regulations concerning participation in resits are listed in article 4.1 of the Faculty Course and Examination Regulations.

Inspection and feedback

How and when an exam review will take place will be disclosed together with the publication of the exam results at the latest. If a student requests a review within 30 days after publication of the exam results, an exam review will have to be organised.

Reading list

To be announced.

Registration

• Enrolment through uSis is mandatory.

• Students will be enrolled for Exams by the Administration Office, as long as they have a valid Tutorial enrolment.

• General information about uSis is available on the website

Contact

• For substantive questions, contact the lecturer listed in the right information bar.

• For questions about enrolment, admission, etc, contact the Education Administration Office: Student Affairs Office for BA Urban Studies

Remarks

None.