The SGS-DTC is a highly attractive environment for doctoral research. Not only do our partner universities offer an excellent research environment, it also offers comprehensive and world-class research training in a number of discipline-specific and interdisciplinary pathways. In addition the SGS-DTC manages a programme of advanced training courses and an annual summer school which together offer our students further opportunities to develop their research, knowledge exchange and transferable professional skills.
Excellent Research Environment
Social science subject areas across the SGS-DTC performed very strongly in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE2008) and some of the top departments are based at our partner universities, including:
- Accounting & Finance at Glasgow and Stirling ranked equal 5th.
- Epidemiology & Public Health at Aberdeen ranked equal 10th.
- Health Services Research at Aberdeen ranked 2nd.
- Information Science at Robert Gordon University ranked 2nd.
- Law at Edinburgh ranked 10th.
- Linguistics at Edinburgh ranked 2nd.
- Psychology at St Andrews and Glasgow ranked 7th equal and 9th equal respectively.
- Social Work/Social Policy at Edinburgh ranked 7th equal.
- Sociology at Edinburgh ranked 6th equal.
- Town & Country Planning at Glasgow and Aberdeen ranked 6th equal.
The SGS-DTC brings together departments and institutions with over 2000 FTE category A staff and a combined total of 2234 PhDs awarded between 2001-07. It is based on 20 years of collaborative experience across Scottish social science, stretching from the inauguration of the Scottish Graduate Programme in Economics in 1989, to the launch of the new Applied Quantitative Methods Network (AQMeN) in 2009 with a commitment of £2.5m from the ESRC and the Scottish Funding Council. The SGS-DTC applies high standards in the selection and training of ESRC-supported students, which both safeguards ESRC investments and allows the benefits of improvements in training at all levels to be realised by a wider group of postgraduate students.
Excellent Research Training Pathways
The SGS-DTC is comprised of 24 pathways. 15 of these are in the following ESRC discipline-based pathways:
- Accounting and Finance
- Business and Management
- Economic and Social History
- Economics
- Education
- Human Geography
- Information Science
- Politics and International Relations
- Psychology
- Social and Applied Investigations in Language
- Social Anthropology
- Social Policy
- Social Work
- Sociology
- Urban Planning and Real Estate
9 of these are in interdisciplinary areas:
- African Studies and International Development
- Environment, Climate Change and Energy
- Families, Relationships and Demographic Change
- Health
- Language Sciences
- Language-based Area Studies
- Science, Technology and Innovation Studies
- Social Care
- Socio-legal Studies and Criminology
Each pathway offers a distinctive and tailored set of training for postgraduates both within the pathway and without. The SGS-DTC is committed to supporting high quality advanced training, organised and delivered by the pathways. Each of our partner universities offers training in a variety of research methods, research design and data collection. The SGS-DTC pathways then offer a programme of advanced and specialist training that might be specific to their discipline or simply represent an advanced training skill that can be applied across a range of social science subjects.
This page was last published on
7 December 2012