Why methods courses will change your life
The answer to all your questions is just one methods course away
It was the spring of 2022, my undergraduate degree was coming to an end, and my inbox surprised me with an acceptance to the MSc in Political Sociology at LSE. I was curious, however, about what my life would have looked like if I got into my second choice course: the MSc Social Research Methods.
Like many others, I wondered: why on earth would someone sign up for a master’s in Methodology? But most importantly, what does a master’s in Methodology entail?
After discussing with my academic mentors, I declined the initial offer and decided to formally submit my application for my second choice. Once again, I was accepted.
Almost two years after, I can say confidently this was the best decision of my life. It gave me the tools to satisfy my endless curiosity, gave me a new lens to analyse the world around me, and the freedom to explore what I love free from labels.
The book of how, when and where
As a child, my favourite book was “The book of how, when and where”. The book answers questions that children ask every day, such as “Where does the dolphin live?”, “How does the GPS work?”, “When did dinosaurs go extinct?”.
I loved it. My parents did too, because it kept me busy and tamed, for the time being, my endless curiosity.
However, it felt, and it still feels like this today, that no book could ever be good enough to answer all my questions. I couldn’t help but wonder “What about the rest?”
High school and university helped me understand which part of ‘the rest’ I was interested in, jumping from aspiring Doctor of Medicine to Doctor of Philosophy (I guess money was not on my mind when I made this decision).
The secret of methods
Back in 2022, when I first applied, the master’s was only a means to an end. I wanted to do a PhD, and hard methodological training would put me in a really good position to apply the following year. I just had to power through what I thought would be a boring, yet useful year of training, to get into my dream PhD programme.
Turns out, that methods classes are actually pretty cool. Who would have thought? Not me.
Methods courses are all about giving you the right tools to answer your wildest questions. From the very first lecture, this felt immensely empowering.
All my lecturers and instructors gave me a clear message: “Think about all the questions you have always been asking yourselves. All the hows, whens, wheres, and whys that have always been bugging you. Well, we don’t have the answer, but we will give you the right tools to find answers yourselves.”
I agree, learning about p-values doesn’t truly sound like some kind of empowering, mindboggling, world-changing activity. But learning about how knowledge production works, how research is done, what good research looks like and why, really helped me develop not only a unique perspective on social sciences but fundamentally reshaped how I view the world. From looking the stats in the newspaper to evaluating any statement of cause and effect (turns out that perhaps drinking wine doesn’t make you live longer), I now see how the very nature of asking questions demands a systematic engagement in finding answers. Fundamentally, we don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are, and methods can give us a bit of clarity in understanding the world as it is.
Can you believe that one of the most interesting and challenging things about social sciences is measurement? Me neither, but if you actually think about it, everything we try to explain comes back to how we think about it (how we conceptualise it) and how we measure it. How can we measure democracy? How can we measure identities? I soon learnt that what we have available as social scientist are only suboptimal measures of what we are actually trying to study. Just proxies.
This taught me to think about problems and puzzles in an innovative way. Issues that seem to have no solutions are just questions waiting for the right method to find answers. It also boosted my creativity! During undergrad, I got the impression that only certain topics were worth studying, certain questions were just impossible to answer, and some questions were too big for what we had accessible. At the LSE, I understood that having big questions is the first step to finding great answers.
What can we do that has not been done before? What data do I need? How can I collect it myself? How do we understand concepts such as identity, and how can we measure it in a way that makes sense? How can we improve the way we study this issue? What stands in between my questions and their answers and how can I overcome it? Just think like a methodologist!
“The book of how, when and where” walked so that methods courses could run.
Losing all labels
I have personally never been a fan of labels. I just don’t like choosing. What if I change my mind? Out of undergrad, it felt really hard to choose whether I was more interested in sociology, social psychology or political science.
Masters’ bought me some time. And it is actually very cool to be a criminologist one day, a moral psychologist the following, and an economist by the end of the week. Truth be told, what I have learnt is that it doesn’t matter whether you have a field or not. You care about questions, and if you are a methodologist, that is enough.
I guess now I am very much a political scientist, but who knows, maybe I’ll change my mind and I will still have the right tools to answer the questions I will be asking.
Going forward
To this day, I attend as many methods trainings and workshops as I can, and I don’t think I will stop any soon. My quest for questions just started and I am really looking forward to exploring new ways to find the answer. As one of the faculty from the Methodology Department once said (or tweeted):
As scientists we often internalize this idea that we are "finding truth." Consequently we condition our self-worth on being "right." This is the wrong way to think about scientists' role! Science is all about being repeatedly wrong, but hopefully a little less wrong each time.
Hopefully one day, I’ll be a bit less wrong and a bit more confident in my own answers, maybe I’ll write the book with the answers to my questions, or maybe a book full of questions, maybe I’ll be an anthropologist, but for sure I’ll be a methodologist.