Sociology and Qualitative Methods

The course aims to provide students with knowledge about sociology and research methods, and to understand their relevance in the different fields of philosophy and other disciplines: from politics to social engineering; from human resources management to robotics; from anthropology to economics; from philosophical counseling to market and applied research.
Hence, the course delivers knowledge about the main theories, their epistemological and methodological features, and the essential bibliographic tools of the discipline, necessary to understand and analyze social situations, group interactions, dyadic relationships, and usable in different realms and professional activities: training, social research, market research, philosophical, entrepreneurial and business consulting.

Knowledge and understanding
- knowledge of the relationship between sociology and research methods;
- understanding the usefulness of sociology in the different fields of philosophy, humanities and applied research;
- knowledge of the main theories, their epistemological and methodological features, and the bibliographic essential tools of the discipline, necessary to understand and analyze social situations, group interactions, dyadic relationships;
- to know the interactional approach and the ethnographic method.

Applied knowledge and understanding
- capacity to approach general issues (relevant to the different fields of application of the discipline) through an appropriate methodological perspective, in order to design an empirical research;
- to apply (through teamworks of attending students) a specific method (the ethnographic one), suitable for studying both private organizations and public institution.

Autonomy of judgment
- to develop skills that allow individual students, based on their theoretical and personal preferences, to conduct a research considering the constraints, resources and opportunities existing in each setting observed.

Skills:
At the end of the course the student will be able to apply the knowledge learned in the different fields of the discipline, and to adopt the different methodological and research perspectives available.

1. Communication skills
Through the teamwork exercise the students will learn to cooperate in groups. By presenting the findings of their exercise, the students will learn to draw up a report (using PowerPoint or other). In addition, through class presentations they will learn to communicate in public.

2. Ability to learn
The exercise in small teamworks will allow the students to reflexively learn the contents delivered by the teacher in frontal lectures.

3. Knowledge and experience (for attending students)
Attending students who will participate to the teamwork exercise, will have an initial socialization to empirical research. The exercise is an added value, which helps to overcome the limitations of a traditional (frontal) course; in this way the knowledge is also embodied in experience (know versus know-how). In addition, the exercise also offers an empowerment of specific skills, potentially useful for the future: in fact, conducting interviews, coordinating group, communicating in public, working in groups, etc. are often required skills in companies and institutions. The secondary effect of the teamwork exercise is to know each other, to make friends, to train empathy (or the sense of the other), to learn how to coordinate each other.