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Training outside the box
26 January 2010
By Tennie Videler
I am a biological and physical scientist by training. My scientific career has involved practical experience of bugs, frogs, gels, pipettes, many uses of computers and different forms of spectroscopy and spectrometry so I have always considered myself pretty interdisciplinary. My research training has been mainly of the on-the-job kind although I have attended specialist training (in Milan and Bloomsbury, for example..).
Now I have left science and am a programme manager for Vitae. Part of my job is to find out what researchers see as the issues that face their professional, personal and career development. One way of doing so is by running focus groups. I have done a couple so far. I hadn’t considered the theoretical aspects of this or that a lot of research and thought has been spent considering how these are best organised and facilitated. This will no doubt horrify the social scientists among you! But this was to some extend rectified as I attended a training day on focus groups last week. It was organised by the association for Social Research Association It was attended by researchers from academia, the public and private sectors. It was a real eye opener. The facilitator was passionate about qualitative social research. It felt unreal to this scientist that listening and empathy could be such valuable research tools. I found out about in-depth interviewing and about sampling.
The extent of my ignorance astounds me every time I do something to reduce it, but learning is always fun. It is important for us as researchers to keep expanding our knowledge and keep training. Other blogs that have covered training so far include 'Learning that sometimes less is more' and 'Skydiving elephants'. In future blog posts I intend to cover researcher training in more depth. Anyone else care to share experiences of training?
So I'm not the only one experiencing the transition from science to social science then. Focus group training sounds like something I should attend.
Chris Thomson
27 January 2010 at 08:36 AMpermalink report this comment
As I'm quite active in some women in computing organisations, I've been to a few events where there have been talks aimed at people working in industry (with titles like "How to get on in all male teams", "Managing your online brand", and so on). One of the things I've learned from this is that a lot of the problems we talk about vis-a-vis research supervision are actually not research problems but management problems. This might be obvious to some, but it was a surprise to me!
Hannah Dee
27 January 2010 at 09:50 AMpermalink report this comment
I become more astounded my ignorance each week! As a social scientist (which some physical scientists would claim is not science) the opportunities for interdisciplinary training are not very extensive (at least not in my area of economics).
I do try to tend regular workshops and "training" seminars on statistical methods and econometric techniques just to keep me on top of the latest developments.
But I can see the value in the sort of training you describe, even in my discipline. For example, climate change economics is becoming an important niche area. No doubt such a topic is at the interface of economics, meterology, and other environmental sciences. I can see training being very helpful here.
Matthew Salois
29 January 2010 at 09:45 PMpermalink report this comment