What training can you provide?
We can provide training on almost any aspect of research and statistical analysis. Originally trained as psychologists, we have a great deal of experience teaching research methods and statistics within the social sciences in a number of universities.
We have a number of half day courses designed which you can see on our
training page . These courses can be combined according to your needs. Alternatively, if our pre-designed courses do not cover topics that you are interested in, we can custom design courses according to your needs.
Contact us to discuss your training needs.
What teaching experience do you have?
We have taught a range of research skills and statistics courses in the psychology departments at a number of universities including Sussex, Dundee, Brunel and Cardiff. This teaching has been at all levels from introductory first year undergraduate teaching through to teaching postgraduate students completing masters of doctoral degrees.
We have also taught on cognitive psychology and neuropsychology courses. Dr Victoria Bourne was nominated for a University of Dundee teaching award.
What experience do you have teaching non-psychologists?
In addition to teaching psychology students, we have experience training people from a wide range of disciplines. In particular, we ran the statistics training for the Generic Skills program at the University of Dundee. People taking this course were from lots of different backgrounds from nursing and dentistry to engineering,
from education to applied computing, from social work to geography. We pride ourselves on being able to present both the theory and the practice of research and statistics in a simple and approachable manner.
I’m interested in you providing training at my institution, but the courses you describe on your website do not cover the topics that I need to be taught. Can you design a course especially for me?
Yes. Please
contact us to discuss your ideas. We can provide training on almost any aspect of research and statistics.
Who will you provide training for?
Anyone who has an interest in research and statistics, whether you are a university, charity or business.
I would like to use some questionnaires to assess personality/cognitive ability/intelligence/attitudes. Can you help me to develop these questionnaires?
Yes. These types of questionnaires are called psychometric tests. One very important thing to bear in mind when using psychometric tests is that they should be well validated,
so research has shown that the questionnaires really measure the abilities and traits that they claim to. For this reason, it is better to use existing measures than to try to design your own.
We have a great deal of expertise in psychometric testing. If you need to use psychometrics, we can help you to decide which tests are most appropriate for your needs and help you to develop a battery of psychometric measures.
Do you have minimum/maximum class sizes?
No. We can do private tuition for an individual through to large scale teaching. We have experience of lecturing to up to 500 participants, so large group teaching is no problem for us.
How are your teaching sessions organised?
Yes. We have a great deal of experience in this type of reconfiguration. Typically we achieve this by writing customised computer programs to extract the data and reconfigure it within one file.
We can provide this configured data file either in Excel or SPSS.
I have a large data set, but it is a bit messy. For example, we have lots of missing values, some incorrectly inputted values or outlying values. Can you tidy up the data?
We like to teach with a blended style of lectures, workshop exercises, interactive exercises and discussions. This varies from course to course and, depending on the topic, can be varied according to your needs.
We always aim to keep the “lecturing” to a minimum and to include as much interaction, practice and discussion as possible.
What materials and resources do you provide?
We provide participants with a handbook that includes all the resources for the course: lecture notes, workshop exercises, etc. The handbook will also include suggestions for further reading and exercises that can be completed after the course to further develop and practice your skills.
For the statistical analysis courses, we also provide a large number of data sets that can be used to practice on.
Can you provide support/consultancy for our specific needs within your training sessions?
To some extent, yes. We understand that research and statistics is often far easier to understand when it is placed in the context that you will need to use it in. We’re happy to discuss such issues within our training courses.
Alternatively, if you know that you will have lots of questions, it is possible to add a half day open session with us. In this session we can answer any questions that you have, talk through possible design issues and/or look at any data sets that you have.
Do you provide follow up support for your courses?
Yes. Within our course handbooks we provide further reading and sources that can be very helpful. For statistical analysis courses we also provide participants with additional exercises and data sets that they can use to practice with.
We can also provide continuing support via email (subject to agreement and costs).
I'm an undergraduate/postgraduate student. Can you provide private tuition or help me with the statistics for my lab report/project/dissertation?
Contact us to let us know what you need help with. We can certainly provide private tuition to help you understand research and statistics and to help you prepare for stats exams and the like.
If you would like us to help with your own research projects, we will
not run or write up your statistics for you – this would take away from your educational experience and do you more harm in the long run.
We can help you by answering your questions and by discussing your design and data with you. Then we will guide you to the right way to analyse the data. We will also help you with any writing up in a similar way.
How much does your training cost?
Costs vary depending on who you are (business, charity, university, student), how much training you would like us to provide (we give discounts for multiple sessions),
how many participants there are (for larger groups we may need more than one facilitator), whether the course is custom designed for you and where the training will take place.
Contact us to discuss your training needs and we can provide you with a quote.