Public Health and Social Sciences

This module aims to help students develop a range of academic and communicative skills necessary for successful study at postgraduate level.

Students will be taught and will practice a range of transferable communicative skills (written and oral) to prepare students for professional life. Students will be encouraged to find useful ways to develop independent learning and encourage students to take responsibility for their personal, academic and professional development.

This module aims to provide you with a good understanding of research theory and practice, enabling you to understand different qualitative and quantitative research methods.

The development, nature, scope and organisation of research is discussed in the module. You will be taught to define research questions, formulate objectives (organise hypothesis testing where relevant), and set decision criteria. The requirement for underpinning research with theory, using tertiary sources in conducting literature research is discussed. The methods and sources of primary and secondary data are introduced including: survey techniques, assessing data quality, and methods of analysis.

The basic principles and practices of qualitative and quantitative research are analysed. Students will be introduced to a range of scientific and social sciences research methods and be taught to identify which methods are most relevant to meet research objectives.

This module aims to introduce you to Psychology and Ethics. Students will learn why knowledge of risk management and ethical approval are important for research studies and good professional practice. This module will overview key psychological approaches and current psychological theorists along with an overview of ethical principles and standards developed in the context of psychological theory. Real-world applications of these approaches will also be discussed along with current debates and trends in practice.

Students will be introduced to fundamental ICT skills that will be necessary to utilise throughout University level studies. This course will address ICT software and topics as they currently exist, bridging the knowledge gap between various versions of software. Students will use common productivity software as well as internet-based applications.

This module introduces students to the interesting challenges that ICT presents today and covers many anchor points that may serve as a bridge to their interests and lifestyles. These bridges include the technology in their mobile telephones, computing equipment, and entertainment software.

This module takes into account that we will be dealing with students from a wide range of cultures and experience with computers, and successful completion indicates that students have obtained a good understanding of and ability to apply common applications (Ms Word, Excel and Power Point) to document creation, data collation and presentation whilst students will also be made aware of the benefits of using web based applications for information presentation and will be expected to use IT to communicate information effectively in a variety of forms.