Studying
The Methods Lab
The Methods Lab of the Faculty of Sociology offers researchers, teaching staff, instructors, lectures as well as master students of Sociology the possibility to use hardware and software for conducting research projects. The workstations of the Methods Lab are equipped with modern hardware, headphones and foot controls. The partitions between the workstations provide sufficient privacy to allow work with confidential data.
Software is available for computer-assisted qualitative data analysis (QDA), which can be used to transcribe, edit, and analyze qualitative data of various types, including sound, images, text, and video. Working with QDA software often facilitates the transcription and data analysis process, especially coding the data material, writing memos, organizing documents, or visualizing relationships between them. The methods lab has two multimedia PCs with up-to-date video and image editing software that can be used for editing or anonymizing, for example. Besides the possibilities for qualitative data analysis, the methods lab can also be used as a phone lab. All workstations are equipped with CATI software, phones and headsets. The phone lab is supervised by Dr. Robert Glowienka.
Access to Methods Lab
The methods lab has a total of six workstations equipped with the necessary hardware and software technology to facilitate working with your own research data. In addition, most of the computerised QDA software can also be used from the comfort of your home office (see Lending). Information on Bielefeld University's VPN-Client can be found here.
Requests to reserve a space can be sent to terminplaner.methodenlabor.soz@uni-bielefeld.de.
As soon as you have received the reservation confirmation by mail, the key for the methods lab can be picked up from the IT supervisors of the Faculty of Sociology in room X-D2-250. It is also possible to reserve the entire methods lab (e.g. in the context of courses).
In case of problems or questions concerning the use of the software, please contact methodenlabor.soz@uni-bielefeld.de (supervision: Josua Sequenz).
The Methods Lab is primarily reserved for staff members of the Faculty of Sociology, doctoral students of the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology, as well as students for Master's theses and teaching research projects.