Applied Social Research (M.Sc.) postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

Twice a year, the county library where I work counts everyone who comes through the door, hour by hour, on paper tally sheets. The first time I helped, I noticed that the sheets recorded how many people arrived but not why. Teenagers came in after school, older men came in to read the newspapers, and parents came in to use the printer for social welfare forms. When the branch manager asked whether the Saturday hours were worth keeping, the tallies told us that Saturdays were busy. They could not tell us who would lose out if the hours changed. That gap between a count and an explanation is why I want to study applied social research at postgraduate level.

My undergraduate degree in Sociology and Geography gave me a grounding in both. In the second year, a quantitative methods module taught me to clean data and run cross-tabulations and logistic regression in SPSS. A qualitative module asked us to transcribe and code a short interview, which took far longer than I expected. For my dissertation, I studied how residents of a commuter town without a rail link used the local bus service. I designed a short questionnaire and distributed it at two bus stops and through a community noticeboard group, collecting 112 responses. I also interviewed six regular passengers. The survey showed that people without a car were more likely to use the bus for shopping and appointments than for work. The interviews explained what the numbers could not. Two women described planning entire days around a single return journey, and one man had turned down evening shifts because no bus could take him home. My sample was small and self-selecting, and I said so plainly in the write-up. Still, the dissertation received a first-class mark. More importantly, it showed me that combining methods is not a formality: each method corrected the limits of the other.

Since graduating, I have worked as a library assistant. Alongside issuing books and managing the public computers, I help run a homework club for primary and secondary pupils two evenings a week. Over the past year, I have kept simple attendance records and asked parents a few questions when they collect their children. From this, I learned that most families rely on the club because there is no quiet space at home. That information helped the branch make a case to keep the club running through the summer. It was a modest exercise, not formal research. Even so, it taught me how carefully questions need to be worded when people are tired, in a hurry or wary of officialdom.

Outside work, I coach an under-12 camogie team with two other parents and a club volunteer. Coaching has little to do with sociology. It has, however, made me patient, organised and good at explaining the same drill four different ways. I also help my grandfather with his pension and medical card paperwork. Sitting at his kitchen table, I have seen how forms designed for administrative convenience can become barriers for people who are not used to them.

Through my reading, I have tried to connect these experiences to research practice. Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone made me think about libraries and sports clubs as social infrastructure. I also wanted to understand the criticisms of how social capital is measured, and Ann Oakley's writing on interviewing women made me question my own role in the dissertation interviews.

I want to develop stronger skills in survey design, sampling, statistical analysis and research ethics. I would like to learn these in an environment where research is expected to be useful to organisations like the ones I work with. In the longer term, I hope to work in evaluation for a local authority, a public body or a community organisation, producing evidence that explains not just how many people use a service but what it means to them.