Qualitative Research Group At The ESRC Festival of Social Science 2023

In celebration of this year’s ESRC Festival of Social Science, Cardiff University invited primary and secondary schools to explore our research and the variety of ways the social sciences support lifelong wellbeing at the ‘Let’s Explore Wellbeing!’ day.

In line with the new curriculum for Wales, the event aimed to build student’s knowledge and understanding of the social sciences while exploring the different components of wellbeing.

Cantonian High School, along with All Saints CIW, Lansdowne, Radnor, and Bryn Celyn primary schools attended the event.

We set up an interactive stand with two ‘have a go’ activities focusing on making sense of qualitative data and conducting thematic analysis in social science.

Students read and organised a piece of text about coping, belief, and disappointment in sport and sorted everyday objects into groups, discussing any challenges and differences of opinion. Learning the concept of coding, labelling, and organising data, students identified different themes and the relationships between them.

154 Year 6, 7, and 8 students visited our stand and were interested in our work, leaving positive feedback on our ‘Words of Wisdom’ wall:

‘Sorting is fun.’

‘It was fun to learn new stuff and listen.’

‘Coding is fun.’

When asked if they learnt something new, students reported:

‘I learnt how to make sense of things.’

‘I leant that everything has a category.’

‘I learnt how to sort different types of categories.’

Students also noted they enjoyed it when we challenged them to look deeper at the data:

‘You can put things into smaller groups than they already are.’

‘How to categorise by everyday usage.’

‘It was nice separating into sub-categories.’

Interestingly, many students had differences of opinion and following discussion and debate, we asked them to think about what would happen in research:

‘You can decide what category to put different objects in.’

‘Always be willing to change something.’

‘I learnt that if you have something that doesn’t fit into any category you can make a new one.’

We have inspired the next generation of qualitative researchers!

Every student was given a CTR gift and handout with reminders of the activities, information about social science, and examples of how data can be used in healthcare research.

For more information on the work of the CTR Qualitative Research Group (QRG) please contact Lucy Brookes-Howell (QRG Lead), Brookes-HowellLC@cardiff.ac.uk / CTR-Qualitative@cardiff.ac.uk or visit www.cardiff.ac.uk/centre-for-trials-research/about-us/qualitative-research

Note: The ESRC Festival of Social Science is an annual, UK-wide, free celebration of the social sciences.

The festival consists of a series of events run each autumn, delivered by ESRC’s ‘festival partners’, higher education institutions spread across the UK. Events range from exhibitions, lectures and panel debates through to performances, guided walks and workshops.