Access and Success Academy – Adopting Quantitative and Qualitative Methods and Demonstrating Impact

This course is a part of NEON Access and Success Academy Evidence of Impact Series. Other sessions in the series include ‘Effective Methods and Practice When Working with Younger Learners‘, ‘Comparison Groups and Causality – Can This Work for Widening Access?‘ and ‘Dissemination: Writing Up Your Research for Publication & Presenting Findings to a Non-specialist Audience‘. 

This one-day interactive online session, delivered by Dr Neil Raven, will cover both quantitative and qualitative methods, equally used in the evaluation of interventions to provide evidence of what works.     

 The emphasis will be on introducing a number of key methods of data collection, informed by practice and underpinned by the literature on research methods. In terms of structure, the session would go from quants to quals (having provided suitably definitions and distinctions), and will start with questionnaires/surveys, before moving to interviews, focus groups, observation, photography (and similar visual based methods) and recognising that some of these are capable of generating both quant and qual data (mixed methods). 

The session would introduce and define each method, explore its strengths and limitations, provide guidance on best practice in design and deployment (drawing on WP related examples), and involve participants exploring how each method could be applied in their case.