Students tackle issues close to the heart in State of the Campus project
5 Hydref 2015
For a number of years the School of Sciences has run the ‘State of the Campus’ research project in the first week of term for returning second year students.
This annual week of activity, supported by Citizens Cymru, sees students take a topic important to their community to campaign for change. This year’s campaign focussed on the quality of student housing, safety and security, and relationships with letting agents.
Over five days the students collected over 200 images, carried out over 200 qualitative interviews and gathered over 1,000 survey responses from undergraduate students across the University campus. A number of recurring themes came up, including the poor condition of student properties, relationships between tenants and landlords, including issues with contracts
The culmination of the week’s
hard work was presented through poster campaigns in the School of Social
Sciences and at a Citizen Assembly to an audience of University staff, students
and external stakeholders.
Professor
Amanda Coffey, Head of the School of Social sciences, attended the assembly and
said: “The State of the Campus project is a great way to reintroduce our second
year undergraduate students to the research environment. Working
collaboratively, students undertake primary research on issues that affect
them, and get the opportunity to see how research can be impactful."
The data collected during the project will be used to inform future action by students, including hosting a housing summit with students, landlords, letting agents, the students’ union and relevant authorities later this academic session, and engaging with local councillors, MPs and AMS. During the Citizen Assembly a tweet was also sent to all local AMs about including letting agencies in the Renting Homes Bill.
Dr Luke Sloan, Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Methods and
academic lead for the project said: “State of the Campus is an incredibly
important ‘learning through doing’ experience for our students. Learning about
how to operationalise a research project and how to collect data in the field
cannot happen effectively in a lecture – students need to be immersed in the
process to gain a deeper understanding of the interplay between data and
methods.
The vast quantity of data obtained and the impressive amount of analysis
conducted is testament to the ability and effort of our students and they now
have the opportunity to take the issues they identified forward with the
support of a large amount of empirical evidence. We are very proud of what they
have managed to achieve in a single week.”