Further resources
If you want to explore further and find out more about the issues discussed in this course, you may find the following of interest.
- For more information on working as a policy researcher, see Prospects’ ‘Policy officer’ information.
- For more information on Henrietta Lacks, see Nature’s 2020 editorial ‘Henrietta Lacks’ in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
- For more information on research ethics, read Resnik, D. (2020) ‘What Is Ethics in Research & Why Is It Important?’.
- For more information on research methodology, you may find the free OpenLearn course Understanding different research perspectives interesting. The full course takes nine hours to complete, but you can look at the individual sections on research ethics, research questions, research design and research methodology.
- For more information on the advantages and disadvantages of quantitative and qualitative research, see Chukwuemeka, E.S. (2023) ‘Advantages And Disadvantages of Quantitative and Qualitative Research’.
- For more information on documentary research, see ‘An Introduction to Documentary Research’ on the American Educational Research Association website.
- For more information on using surveys, see ‘What to know about creating good survey questions’ on the SurveyMonkey website.
- For more information on descriptive statistics and inferential statistics, see the Statistics How To website, which discusses descriptive statistics and inferential statistics in more detail.
- For more information on working with statistics, see the free OpenLearn course ‘More working with charts, graphs and tables’.
- For more information on writing a report, see the University of Wollongong’s Policy research advice, and The Writing Centre of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s ‘Policy briefs’.
- For more information on writing an executive summary see Harvard Kennedy School’s guidance ‘How to Write an Executive Summary’
- For more examples of images depicting qualitative data, see the Royal Geographic Society’s ‘A Guide to Presenting Qualitative Data’.
OpenLearn - Carrying out research for policy and advocacy work 
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