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Simon ForrestSchool of Medicine, Pharmacy and Health

Durham University

Please write me a postcard

Do you teach social science research methods outside your ‘home’ discipline?

What challenges does this pose for you?

What would be the single greatest support to your practice?

• Context and drivers• This project• Emerging issues• Emerging ideas• Questions

ContextChanging landscape of health needs and healthcare

Social sciences and medicine and health

Medicine and

Healthcare

Public Policy and Health

Patient perspectives

Public health

Psycho-social theories of

behaviour and behaviour changes

Psychology

Medical sociology

Sociology

Medical Education: framework and prescription

The project• What is the current practice around teaching social science research

methods to undergraduate medical students in the UK: what is being taught, how are teaching and learning organised within the curriculum, how is content is delivered, to and by whom and how is student learning assessed?

• And, what are the challenges and opportunities around developing this teaching and learning practice and the curriculum and policy contexts that frame it?

Capturing the ‘state of the art’ through research with colleagues involved this organising and delivering this teaching across all 32 Medical Schools in the UK complemented by a review of the literature.

Emerging issues

Defining methods: used for or borrowed from social science? Method, approach to analysis, choice of topic?

Parachute – paradigms and epistemologies – determinism, postivism, interpretivism, constructivism, identities/subjectivities, (super) structural relationships of biological and psycho-social, ‘normal & abnormal’

Structural diversity

Realisation of TDs LOs in curriculum structures and content

Organisation of teaching and learning

• EBM, PH, BSS etc.• The ‘Projects’ model• The elective model• The intercalation (into medical education)

model• UG versus PG

Working away from home

• Weakened or absent collegial support• Disciplinary support and currency of

knowledge• Teaching versus research • Research context (Clinical, PH, Med Ed.)• Status and career trajectorie

Student engagement

• ‘Nice but not need to know’• Clinical (ir)relevance• Programme learning relevance (assessment)• Students as partners in research

Impact on practice

• Evidential wilderness

– Where we would expect to see the impact?

• Proximal – performance in assessment • Medial – future activities as medics• Distal – Patient benefit

Way of seeing

• Not pragmatics but paradigms• Not content but core ideas

• ‘it is not only information that they need – in the Age of Fact – information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it. It is not only the skills of reason that they need…what they need…is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what might be happening within themselves. It is this quality…that journalist and scholars, artists and public, scientists and editors are coming to expect of what might be called the sociological imagination’

• C. Wright Mills (1959:11)

Ways of knowing

• Reflexivity • Subject-object relations• Knowledge acts and acts of knowledge are

situated in Structure – culture – agency

Questions

• What is ‘sufficient’ knowledge for a non-social scientist to be competent/safe/appropriate to engage in empirical research?

• What might social scientists gain from engagement with medics? (which way does the traffic run?)

• What happens to the social scientist who ‘crosses the bridge’ (and can you come back)?