Mixed approach

THES reporters look at how departments prepared for and responded to last week's research assessments.

APPLIED SOCIAL SCIENCE: STIRLING

1992 rating: 5

1996 rating: 5*

Applied social science at Stirling University is a broad-based, interdisciplinary department, encompassing sociology, social policy, social work and housing studies, writes Olga Wojtas. It also includes several specialist centres of excellence, such as the social work research centre, the dementia services development centre and the Scottish drugs training project.

Department head Christine Hallett said there are problems for an interdisciplinary department in making submissions to RAE panels based on specific disciplines. "We have a range of staff who are sociologists, and it's not easy to make a decision about where to send the department's submission. We sent the whole department's submission to the social work and social policy panel, because it encompassed most of the work most easily," Professor Hallett said.

The department has boosted its RAE rating to a 5*. But even if this had slipped, its external research income is large enough to have sustained major projects. It has an annual operating budget of Pounds 970,000, coming mostly from the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council, but the external funding it submitted to the RAE for the period since the last assessment totalled Pounds 3.75 million.

The number of research-active staff submitted has increased by a third to 24, virtually all those eligible. The department shunned any pre-submission headhunting, with the assessment panel hinting it would be unimpressed by widescale dabbling in the academic transfer market.

The department tackles a broad range of social issues and social problems, but since the last RAE it has focused on three research themes: social exclusion and marginalisation, social care and health, and the care and protection of children and young people.