Social Research Skills and Teaching Workshops
Social Research Skills and Teaching Workshops
Wednesday, 9 July 2025: 00:00
Location: ASJE028 (Annex of the Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences)
Oral Presentation
Current studies on young people have emphasized the need to cultivate "flexible minds" (Zerubavel), capable of considering others' perspectives and building knowledge about a world that is (still) "manichaean”, xenophobic, often governed by stereotypes, and marked by inequalities.
In social research, the qualitative approach seems particularly suitable because it encourages training in controlling their own stereotypes and prejudices, role-taking, refining sociological imagination, understanding the complexity of social reality, and respecting the people being studied. To achieve these goals, it is important to identify new educational strategies.
Over the years of teaching methodological and sociological subjects, I have developed and proposed several workshops to students that I found effective in achieving these objectives. I aim to illustrate their implementation and present and comment on the results. These focus on themes such as sociological imagination, stereotypes, categorization.
As an example, I will mention two:
In social research, the qualitative approach seems particularly suitable because it encourages training in controlling their own stereotypes and prejudices, role-taking, refining sociological imagination, understanding the complexity of social reality, and respecting the people being studied. To achieve these goals, it is important to identify new educational strategies.
Over the years of teaching methodological and sociological subjects, I have developed and proposed several workshops to students that I found effective in achieving these objectives. I aim to illustrate their implementation and present and comment on the results. These focus on themes such as sociological imagination, stereotypes, categorization.
As an example, I will mention two:
- Hidden values in advertising images: I present to students some advertising images. I ask them to examine them attentively and then to propose values, trends, and themes that can be inferred from these representations. The goal is twofold: a) to train students in a qualitative analysis technique while simultaneously activating their sociological imagination; b) to illustrate socio-psychological theoretical references in an interactive and engaging way by relating to contemporary reality.
- Categorization: I ask students, divided into groups, to classify and then to name a set of 40 images (the same for all groups). The results invariably show that the categorization process is not shared or stable but follows paths depending on different points of view. I also believe it is important to convey the experiences of qualitative researchers to future researchers. For instance, William Foote Whyte (from Street Corner Society: "... I began to realize how little I knew about the motivations that drive people to act").