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Researching Hidden and Hard-to-reach Populations (574X8)

Level 7 (Masters)

Summer teaching

Hard to reach, ‘rare’ and/or ‘hidden’ populations are interesting to social science researchers, but come with challenges to identify and involve them in the research process. These populations often include individuals, facing stigmatisation, who may not want to identify themselves in public contexts.    

In this module, you'll take a look at the reasons why we may want to engage such populations in research, and assess the range of methods employed to access them.

This includes:

• various chain referral methods
• respondent driven sampling
• privileged access interviews
• engaged or activist research
• applications of internet research.

Although some of these applications, such as snowball sampling, are well established, others are only widely used in health research and are still at the experimental stage in the social sciences more broadly.  Research with hard to reach and hidden populations often comes with ethical concerns, which you'll also  consider in detail.

We regularly review our modules to incorporate student feedback, staff expertise, as well as the latest research and teaching methodology. We’re planning to run these modules in the academic year 2024/25. However, there may be changes to these modules in response to feedback, staff availability, student demand or updates to our curriculum.

We’ll make sure to let you know of any material changes to modules at the earliest opportunity.