Each year, the ARK Research Centre carries out a set amount of work for voluntary and community sector organisations that is free of charge. Whilst providing this support, we found that many of the same questions were asked by different organisations. Therefore, we thought it would be useful to provide key training on undertaking social research projects

From 2007, ARK has run a research methods training programme for voluntary sector organisations, in association with the Northern Ireland Council for Voluntary Action (NICVA). The programme consists of five half-day sessions, with some sesions being held at Queen's University Belfast and others held at NICVA. The sessions cover:

• Locating research information.
• Designing a research project, including questionnaire design, focus groups, in-depth interviews, evaluation, audits, ethics and working with peer researchers.
• Quantitative data analysis, incorporating questionnaire coding, inputting data into SPSS, and running descriptive statistics within SPSS.
• Qualitative data analysis.
• Report writing and dissemination.

In 2010, the programme ran from January to March 2010.

If you have any comments about the programme, please contact Dirk Schubotz at 028 9097 3947, email d.schubotz@qub.ac.uk