For many readers of this book one of the main reasons for using it will be to enable you to undertake a research project of your own, perhaps for the fi rst time. With this in mind, I have included boxed features entitled ‘Student experience’, which are based on the experiences of undergraduate and postgraduate social science students who have done a research project, usually as part of their fi nal year dissertation. The aim of these boxes is to provide insight and advice based on the experiences of real students in their own words, or in other words, to ‘tell it like it is’, as Nichols and Beynon (1977) have put it. This feature is based on a set of questionnaires completed by undergraduate and postgraduate students from a variety of different UK university social science departments. The main point of this feature is to provide you with insights into the experiences of student researchers.

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