Social research postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My interest in social research grew out of a fairly mundane practical problem. For my undergraduate dissertation I wanted to understand why a subsidised community bus route in my home town was well used by some residents and ignored by others. I had expected to spend my time thinking about mobility and social exclusion; in practice I spent it thinking about sampling. Recruiting through the drivers gave me only people who already travelled, and my first interview schedule produced polite agreement rather than useful detail. Rewriting it around specific journeys people had made in the previous week, rather than their general opinions of the service, changed the quality of my data completely. I ended up with fourteen interviews and a much clearer sense that design decisions, not analytical cleverness, do most of the work in social research.

My degree gave me a reasonable grounding to build on. I took quantitative methods in my second year, working with the British Social Attitudes data in SPSS, and I was surprised to find I enjoyed it, particularly the point at which cross-tabulations stop describing and start prompting questions. Alongside that I studied research ethics and qualitative analysis, and I coded my own interview transcripts by hand before using NVivo, which made me appreciate how much interpretation happens at the coding stage. I have since worked through parts of an introductory R text on my own, mainly to move away from menu-driven software and to keep a record of what I have actually done to a dataset. I am aware this is self-taught and uneven, and that a structured course would give me the statistical foundations I currently have only in outline, especially regression and the logic of survey weighting.

Since graduating I have volunteered roughly one day a fortnight with a local housing charity, helping with a tenant satisfaction survey. My role has been an assisting one: printing and posting questionnaires, entering responses, sitting in on two doorstep sessions with the policy officer and taking notes while she asked the questions. It has been more instructive than I anticipated. I watched people hesitate over a question asking them to rate their landlord, because they were unsure whether the charity or the housing association was meant, and I saw how much depended on the volunteer reading the question exactly as written. Being allowed to observe rather than lead meant I could pay attention to these details. I also helped clean the entered data and found duplicated records where a household had responded twice, which made concrete the difference between a response rate and a usable sample.

My paid work is in a public library, where I run a weekly reading group and help people with the self-service computers, often older residents applying for benefits or bus passes. It is not research, but it has taught me to ask questions without leading people, to stay patient when an explanation needs repeating, and to keep confidences about what I see on a screen. Those habits feel directly relevant to fieldwork.

I am applying for postgraduate study in social research because I want to be a competent methodologist rather than someone who improvises. I am particularly keen to strengthen my quantitative skills, to learn mixed-methods design properly, and to get supervised experience of a full project from research question to write-up. In the longer term I would like to work in research for a local authority or a voluntary sector organisation, producing evidence that the people commissioning it can actually use. A rigorous methods training is the part of that I cannot sensibly teach myself.

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