ABSTRACT
As recently as the last couple of decades, the student body in many university social science courses was presumed (with some justification) to be more or less culturally homogeneous, and the content and orientation of the curriculum reflected this presumption. There was little perceived need to provide a basic general grounding in research methods, since students entering the courses would have at some earlier stage in their education (it was assumed, with perhaps less justification) become familiar with the basic principles of Western research traditions. Any more detailed understanding they needed could be picked up from the research literature. Today, however, a large and ever increasing proportion of students come from a wide variety of social and cultural backgrounds. Whatever grounds there were, a generation or two ago, for assuming cultural homogeneity are clearly no longer valid. Although this applies to most, if not all, non-traditional students (including those from regional and socio-economic subcultures; disabled students; mature-age students; and the like), in this chapter our concern is with national and ethnic cultural groups. As mentioned in the Introduction to this book, the rapid diversification of the student body is one of the motivations for the contemporary emphasis in virtually all major universities on the explicit and systematic teaching of research methods.
