Monday 11 April 2011

DD101 Introducing the Social Sciences - TMA 03 : Part 1

I like working with numbers & statistics and I have a good understanding of arithmetic and percentages, so I thought that this part of the TMA would be right up my street and pretty straight forward - how wrong I was.

Being a bit 'geeky', I put all the data on to a Excel spreadsheet, which makes doing repetitive calculations really quick, to see what obvious differences there were. It threw up several things to comment on for each table - so I thought I was pretty much sorted with Part 1.

I was just beginning to write about the relative differences and similarities between Stratford and England, using what quantitative data I could from the tables, when I re-read the question. "What can you say about the identities of the people of Stratford, based on the tables provided"  I'm now thinking that this part of the TMA is not quite as simple as I first thought, and I now need to tie whatever quantitative data I decide to use to theories or ideas about 'identity'.

Kath Woodward writes in "Social sciences the big issues" that identity is made up from, among other things, gender, race/ethnicity, visible signs, difference/same, place, body, job/life chances - so there is probably enough in this book and the DD101 course book to help tie the data to identity issues.

This is one of the things they always say you should check - that you have answered the question set, not gone off on some tangent, so I guess its sort of back to square one for now..........

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