Postgraduate Prospectus

Duration: 3 years full-time plus 1 year writing-up or 6 years part-time plus 2 years writing-up.
This programme gives students the opportunity to acquire first-class methodological expertise, and, if desired, to apply this expertise to substantive research into their chosen topic. Students are normally required to take four clinics from the Institute’s programme in each of their first two years. (Clinics are short intensive courses that teach the theory and practice of a particular research method). Students without sufficient background in research methods may also be required to take additional taught modules in their first year, as decided by the Director of Postgraduate Studies in consultation with the student’s supervisors. Normally, these will be chosen from the modules on Research Design, Philosophy of Social Sciences, Qualitative Methods and Quantitative Methods offered by the MA in Research Methods (MARM) consortium that jointly delivers MA training.

Students are usually supervised jointly by the MDI and one of the other Schools or Institutes of the University appropriate to their research area.

Current research interests within MDI are outlined below. Although these are our main areas of research, expertise in other areas and disciplines can be provided through joint supervision from other Schools or Institutes. Please get in touch to discuss options further.

The research interests of MDI staff:

Methodological Research

Focusing on studies of measurement and operationalisation, complex data structures, research design, multivariate analysis and textual analysis.

Comparative social research

The MDi is involved in a number of large scale, EU-wide collaborative research projects about citizens, political parties, media, social movements and political institutions. These projects offer many opportunities for PhD research in international networks.

Political and social attitudes and behaviour

The MDi is linked to, and involved in, a number of large-scale projects that collect data about parties and voters in various contexts, each of which provides many opportunities for subsequent PhD research. Examples are the BES (British Election Studies), the EES (European Election Studies), the ESS (European Social Survey), the CSES (Comparative Study of Electoral Systems), the World Values Study, etc.

Systematic analysis of text The MDI develops and applies automated methods of content analysis to political text such as speeches and manifestos to determine topic, content, and the ideological positions of actors. Current projects focus integrating methods from different disciplines, particularly discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and statistical machine learning, into a cohesive framework for systematic social science text analysis. These methods offer rich possibilities for PhD research into political party dynamics, mass communication, and strategic role of political rhetoric in international contexts.