Syllabus
The course in 2024 will take place in the Podblanicko region and will focus on tourism and geographical analysis of the defined area in cooperation with the Destination Management Agency (Kraj blanických rytířů - Podblanicko). The field work will take place on 9-11th May 2024.
Actual information about the course and communication with the students use moodle website: https://dl2.cuni.cz/course/view.php?id=2401
More information on past courses and research results are available on: https://urrlab.cz/vyuka/metody-terenniho-vyzkumu-v-socialni-geografii/
Introductory lecture with basic information, exam requirements, course content. The exact course content is always adjusted according to the current topic of the survey.
Block I - 4 hours of lectures (within 1 day), in Prague
Literature and data sourcesLiterature management, article database, Gateway to information, literature citation, data sources (statistics, records), impact factor journals, Web of Science and Scopus + qualitative data (interview, observation, documents)Using various research techniquesDesk research, statistical processing and organization of research, combination of data sources, data organization, management and storage in databases, overview of data sources, software and its use, preparation of quantitative characteristics for selected sites
Block II - 3 days in the field - 14 hours of field research (exercises)
The field survey is adapted to the current topic of the solution - examples from previous years:
Field research, environmental monitoring, case studies, direct and participating observationQuestionnaire survey, media analysis, archival workControlled and uncontrolled interviews, sample selection and representativeness, questionnaire design
Block III - 6 hours of lectures in the field trip
Interpretation and presentation of researchCartographic expression in social geography, graphs, mistakes in research interpretationArticle publicationPrinciples of geographical journalism, how to publish an article, hypotheses, main parts of the publication, summary of research results, abstract, text structure, balance, summary and conclusions.
Block IV - 6-8 hours in a large classroom (Prague)
Presentation of work results, posters, etc.
Annotation
The course in 2024 will take place in the Podblanicko region and will focus on tourism and geographical analysis of the defined area in cooperation with the Destination Management Agency (Kraj blanických rytířů - Podblanicko). The field work will take place on 9-11th May 2024.
The course is designed for students of master degree and higher years of bachelor degree. During the course, advanced techniques and methods used in sociogeographic research are discussed and practically demonstrated. Students will acquire the principles of research project design, selected quantitative and qualitative methods of field research. The core part of the course is the practical part, which takes the form of a 3-4-day field trip. The final part is devoted to statistical and cartographic processing of the field survey, interpretation of results, or their publication. Approximately from half of the courses have been produced a publication based on the results of our own field research. The lecture consists of four blocks - in the entry block the main principles of the research work and course information are presented; followed by the preparation of fieldwork, including partial processing in the field laboratory; the block also includes one block of lectures; the final block is devoted to the interpretation of the results; preparation of the publication. Students work in multi-member teams. The research outputs of the previous teams from 2007 onwards are available here: https://urrlab.cz/vyuka/metody-terenniho-vyzkumu-v-socialni-geografii/.