2025/2026 BA-BSOCO1833U Qualitative Methods
English Title | |
Qualitative Methods |
Course information |
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Language | English |
Course ECTS | 7.5 ECTS |
Type | Mandatory |
Level | Bachelor |
Duration | One Semester |
Start time of the course | Autumn |
Timetable | Course schedule will be posted at calendar.cbs.dk |
Study board |
Study Board for Global Relations
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Course coordinator | |
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Main academic disciplines | |
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Teaching methods | |
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Last updated on 20-05-2025 |
Relevant links |
Learning objectives | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
On successful completion of the course the
student should be able to:
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Examination | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Course content, structure and pedagogical approach | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Qualitative methods are not only important in order to prepare you to write your bachelor project and eventually your master thesis. Qualitative methods are essential for understanding what knowledge is, how it comes about, and how it is used and misused by powerful institutions. Organizations rely on qualitatively produced knowledge to understand customers' needs, to develop future scenarios, and to understand and shape the environments in which they act. This course will teach you not only how to become a good researcher, but also how to work ethically with human perceptions of the world.
Generally speaking, when you want to know something about human beings, the university sorts researchers into two big piles – those who count and do math (quantitative researchers), and those who talk and care about meaning (qualitative researchers). This split, however, is a harmful fiction. There aren’t any “counting” methods that don’t make some sort of assessment of significance; and there are no meaning methods that don’t enumerate as part of their argument for validity. More to the point, there are no good questions you can ask about humans that wouldn’t require both counting and assertions of meaning.
So, if the quantitative/qualitative split is more a bureaucratic convenience than any sort of real comment on the operation of the human science, what are we left with? The very short answer is “specific objects of analysis.” That is to say, specific things that researchers assume exist out in the world and then allow them to do research. Sociologists tend to assume that there is some sort of thing like society out there in the world that they can know about. Similarly, anthropologists tend to act like there is something out there in the world like culture that they can know about. Each discipline has a sort of presupposition about the world, and then has developed methods that allow them to know about it.
Each class session will be divided in half and will start with a workshop on the previous week’s topic, and then a lecture on a new topic. Groups will be given a specific site in or around Copenhagen, which will function as their empirical site and, together with the worksheets, the basis for the examination. |
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Research-based teaching | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
CBS’ programmes and teaching are research-based. The following
types of research-based knowledge and research-like activities are
included in this course:
Research-based knowledge
Research-like activities
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Description of the teaching methods | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The course uses a combination of lectures, workshops, off-campus fieldwork, and discussion. For each topic, students will have the opportunity to read about it and discuss, experiment with it in class, experiment with it in relation to their own research topic, and then receive feedback on a given topic in a workshop in class. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Feedback during the teaching period | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Students receive feedback in workshop course sections, in group workshops, on mandatory assignments, and in scheduled consultation hours. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Student workload | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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