• For Emma Smith’s website on secondary data, go to www.secondarydataanalysis.com which gives access to a broad range of UK, US and international data. Scan through some of the data. See if it gives you any ideas.
• www.neighbourhood.statistics.gov.uk/dissemination/
• Office for National Statistics website http://www.ons.gov.uk gives a broad range of UK statistics in a number of categories.
• Fedstats  http://www.fedstats.gov/  is an American government website giving statistics on a wide range of matters, from an A to Z of topics to ‘mapstats’ to statistics from a range of agencies such as the Bureau of Justice or the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
• The Office for National Statistics website http://www.ons.gov.uk gives a broad range of UK statistics in a number of categories. These include the following: business and energy; children, education and skills; crime and justice; economy; government; health and social care; labour market; people and places; population; travel and transport. Results of the census are also given for 2011 and for the last 100 years, with interactive maps.
• Offstats http://www.offstats.auckland.ac.nz/ is a New Zealand-based resource offering especially statistics on government, politics and the media.
• The Statistical Abstract of the United States http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/ is the digest of statistics coming from the US census and focuses on the social, political, and economic organization of the United States. Sources of data for the abstract include the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis, and many other Federal agencies and private organizations.
• Undata http://data.un.org/ is the United Nations collation of country data services, with particularly useful areas on crime and education. The latter includes links to a broad range of other databases including those of UNESCO and the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
• The World Factbook is produced by the CIA (yes, the CIA – the Central Intelligence Agency) https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/. As it describes itself, it ‘…provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 267 world entities’. It is very useful for making international comparisons.
• HESA, The Higher Education Statistics Agency www.hesa.ac.uk

• Campbell Collaboration or Cochrane Collaboration www.campbellcollaboration.org This gives as its general purpose ‘Improving decision-making through systematic reviews on the effects of interventions’.
• Cochrane Collaboration www.cochrane.org – the same but in healthcare.
• Also see the Educational Evidence Portal www.eep.ac.uk/DNN2
• Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Co-ordinating Centre at http://eppi.ioe.ac.uk/cms/.

• Digest Online at http://journals.cambridge.org/spd/action/home
• Richard Kimber's Political Science Resources http://www.politicsresources.net/
• The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse collects documents and information from civil rights cases in specific case categories across the United States: http://www.clearinghouse.net .
• Find government information at http://www.gksoft.com/govt . Good for ‘Comprehensive database of governmental institutions on the World Wide Web: parliaments, ministries, offices, law courts, embassies, city councils, public broadcasting corporations, central banks, multi-governmental institutions etc. Includes also political parties. Online since June 1995. Contains more than 17000 entries from more than 220 countries and territories as of June 2002’.
• http://politics.guardian.co.uk

• American Psychological Association Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct: http://www.apa.org/ethics/code/index.aspx
• American Sociological Association Code of Ethics http://www2.asanet.org/members/ecoderev.html
• British Educational Research Association Ethical Guidelines www.bera.ac.uk/system/files/3/BERA-Ethical-Guidelines-2011.pdf
• British Psychological Society Code of Ethics www.bps.org.uk/system/files/.../code_of_ethics_and_conduct.pdf
• ESRC The Research Ethics Guidebook www.esrc.ac.uk/_images/Framework-for-Research-Ethics_tcm8-4586.pdf
• General Medical CouncilGood Practice in Research and Consent to Research www.gmc-uk.org/Research_guidance_FINAL.pdf_31379258.pdf
• Social Policy Association Guidelines on Research Ethics www.social-policy.org.uk/downloads/SPA_code_ethics_jan09.pdf
• US Department of Health and Human Services Office for Human Research protections http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/archive/irb/irb_guidebook.htm
• WHO http://www.who.int/ethics/Ethics_basic_concepts_ENG.pdf and their guidelines on ethics in use at
• World Health Organization’s form templates and guidelines on ethics http://www.who.int/rpc/research_ethics/informed_consent/en/

• The Open University – Skills for OU Study http://www.open.ac.uk/skillsforstudy/
• www.i-cite.bham.ac.uk/ This excellent website provides all you need to know and more about citation. Click ‘How to reference correctly’ and on the next page click ‘Harvard (author-date)’. It’s most likely that you will be asked by your tutors to use Harvard referencing, but it may be the case in some subjects that you will be asked to use Numbering (Vancouver) or Footnotes or OSCOLA (for law students). The website also gives guidance on all of these.

https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/as/studentservices/conduct/plagiarism/index.aspx

A major example of a longitudinal study is in the Millennium Cohort Study http://www.cls.ioe.ac.uk/page.aspx?&sitesectionid=851&sitesectiontitle=Welcome+to+the+Millennium+Cohort+Study

A useful resource for comparative research is the World Health Organisation (WHO) statistics, which can be found at www.who.int/whosis/whostat/EN_ WHS08_Full.pdf.

Sampling Research methods knowledge base:
http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/sampprob.php

http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR4-3/winter.html
From: Winter, G. (2000) A Comparative Discussion of the Notion of 'Validity' in Qualitative and Quantitative Research The Qualitative Report, 4, 3 & 4. Winter provides a full and interesting discussion of validity.

Surveys online: www.surveymonkey.com

• Many standardised tests – of attainment in reading, maths, non-verbal ability or a wide range of other faculties – are now available online, e.g. at www.gl-assessment.co.uk/
• A range of scales can be accessed via the Evaluation Instruments Bank at

http://eib.emcdda.europa.eu/html.cfm/index3676EN.html

An excellent outline of participant observation is given at
http://www.infed.org/research/participant_observation.htm

• www.phenotyping.com/sociogram/
• A good website on sociometry is: http://www.hoopandtree.org/sociometry.htm which gives information on the sociomatrix – one of these is used in Colin Lacey’s High Town Grammar.

An excellent summary of presenting quantitative data is given at
www.stats.gla.ac.uk/steps/glossary/presenting_data.html
... and the same website gives an excellent discussion of probability at:
http://www.stats.gla.ac.uk/steps/glossary/probability.html#probability.

Qualitative research resources are listed at

http://www.qualitativeresearch.uga.edu/QualPage/discipline,philosophy.html

• Publishing educational research: guidelines and tips. Available at: http://legacy.aera.net/uploadedFiles/Journals_and_Publications/Journals/pubtip.pdf
• http://browse.oecdbookshop.org/oecd/pdfs/browseit/9202081E.PDf for a technical discussion of what research is – for the advanced student.
• Capital Community College Foundation produces a ‘Guide to Grammar and Writing’, which contains a useful page at http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/composition/thesis.htm# This discusses what the authors call the ‘thesis statement’, which is an alternative to the research question.

• For Google Scholar type http://scholar.google.com/
• For Google Books type http://books.google.com
• Google Groups, http://www.groups.google.com lets you connect with like minded people
• Remember www.amazon.co.uk  (or www.amazon.com  for the US version) has some useful features such as ‘Search Inside!’™ which allows you to look at the contents pages and to read the first chapter, the index and some other information about the book.
• Your library should give you access to the Web of Knowledge (also called the Web of Science). Type http://portal.isiknowledge.com/portal.cgi  At the homepage click ‘Social Sciences Citation Index’ and follow the instructions on what to do.
• Your university library will provide a way for you to use to Zetoc, which gives access to the British Library’s 20,000 journals and 16,000 conference proceedings published every year. Type http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk/ and fill in your university’s details
• There are dozens of other subject-specific databases. To review these to see which would be useful for you, go to your appropriate library webpage. Most university libraries nowadays will provide a page which is a bit like Google, which lets you search the vast expanse of the whole library. My library’s (open to everyone) is at http://findit.bham.ac.uk/ . From here, you go to the top right of the page and click ‘Find Databases’, then click ‘Search by Subject’, then choose a category, such as ‘Healthcare’ and then a subcategory (if you wish), such as nursing, and the webpage will list all 25 relevant subject-specific databases.
• Arksey and Omalley define, describe and discuss the use of detailed literature reviews, which are sometimes called ‘scoping studies’: Arksey, H. and O’Malley, L. (2005). Scoping studies: towards a methodological framework. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 8 (1): 19-32. Available at http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/1618/1/Scopingstudies.pdf   
• BUBL Information Service, http://bubl.ac.uk . A ‘catalogue of internet resources’. It’s like a mini-encyclopedia.
• Scholarly Internet Resource Collection, http://infomine.ucr.edu

Ask an expert, http://www.refdesk.com/expert.html

There is an excellent, practical webpage on the use of diaries at
http://sru.soc.surrey.ac.uk/SRU2.html

Prosser, J. and Loxley, A. (2008) Introducing visual methods: ESRC National Centre for Research Methods review paper. Available at:

http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/420/1/MethodsReviewPaperNCRM-010.pdf