Social Research Theory and Practice

Socio-legal research gathers, analyses and interprets data relating to the law and legal systems. To teach you how socio-legal research can,  and is, deployed, this course contains two modules.

The first covers the basic of social research (of which socio-legal research is a subset) and provides you with key skills for understanding, critically evaluating, interpreting, designing, and developing rigorous and ethical research practice.

The second module teaches you how to select and apply a range of contemporary qualitative skills and research methods within your own research. These include: qualitative sampling; the interviewing process; in-depth and narrative interviewing; focus groups: content analysi; Indigenous methodologies; ethnographic research; and qualitative analysis and results presentation.

Both modules use case studies to contextualise and provide examples of how socio-legal research operates in the field and demonstrate the many different method and methodological options available for conducting valid qualitative socio-legal research.