Research Minded Project (L5023)

45 credits, Level 6

Autumn and spring teaching

This module focuses on guided research enquiry into a topic of your choice, relevant to social work practice or theory.

The module aims to enable you to make links between research and professional practice, and to develop your research knowledge and skills practice in planning, conducting and writing up a piece of literature based research. This module focuses on the guiding of your own literature based research enquiry, with the majority of work undertaken in private study.

Module content will include:

• framing research questions and planning a literature-based research-minded project examining a topic of your choice
• rigorous review of relevant literature and research evidence
• application and review of the research methodologies, methods and ethics used in your enquiry
• systematic analysis and synthesis of findings into a coherent and integrated critical report
• drawing conclusions from research findings, identifying their relevance to contemporary practice or theory and evaluating the research process
• making links between research and professional practice and to utilise research mindedness in relation to practice
• critically locating within appropriate theoretical, conceptual and evidential contexts, a topic relevant to social work as a professional and/or discipline
• further increasing and developing your knowledge of and ability to apply research mindedness, understanding and skills of critical appraisal, as both a consumer and practitioner of social work research
• developing, planning, conduct and writing up an informed, ethically sound and well argued piece of literature-based research in the form of an undergraduate dissertation.

Contact hours and workload

This module is approximately 450 hours of work. This breaks down into about 16 hours of contact time and about 434 hours of independent study. The University may make minor variations to the contact hours for operational reasons, including timetabling requirements.

We regularly review our modules to incorporate student feedback, staff expertise, as well as the latest research and teaching methodology. We’re planning to run these modules in the academic year 2025/26. However, there may be changes to these modules in response to feedback, staff availability, student demand or updates to our curriculum.

We’ll make sure to let you know of any material changes to modules at the earliest opportunity.

Courses

This module is offered on the following courses:

• Social Work BA