BA Economics & Psychology

The module will provide you with a balanced introduction to economics which will be based on a programme of systematic directed reading, supplemented by experiments and exercises undertaken in tutorials.

The module uses the innovative COREecon resources, which provides a complete introduction to economics and the economy. COREecon teaches about the economy and economics by starting from a question or a problem about the economy - why the advent of capitalism is associated with a sharp increase in average living standards, for example - and then teach the tools of economics that contribute to an answer. This innovative approach ensures that students understand how the tools of economics can help us understand the modern economy.

The second half of the module is the study of how analytical thinking, scientific method and associated tools can be used to help decision making. This Business Analysis element of the module will provide an overview of where methods and tools are widely used across a large range of industries including the manufacturing, retail, healthcare, financial services, travel, and electronics industries, as well as in local and national government.

Examples of where Business Analysis is put into practice are:

• the management of new building projects
• the design of efficient transport systems and plant layouts
• personnel scheduling
• allocation of resources and financial modelling and forecasting

This area of expertise can help to reduce costs, increase revenues, improve customer service, increase efficiency and can even save lives.

The aim of this module is to provide you with a solid foundation and understanding of the theories and principles underlying marketing and entrepreneurship. A combination of the subjects will be taught to enhance understanding of the way the two disciplines address issues related to both the macro and micro-environment contexts of markets and entrepreneurship.

Marketing is a complex process involving many different skills and activities, but it is based upon simple principles: understanding what customers want and need, being able to collect and process information relevant to the marketing environment and being able to put together and implement plans to take the business forward.

In this module, you will be exposed to concepts and ideas from economics, sociology, psychology, geography and other social sciences, all in the context of the competitive business environment.

Entrepreneurship too is a complex process involving many different skills and activities, though it is based upon a 'mindset and process by which an individual or group identifies and successfully exploits a new idea or opportunity. For this part of the module, you'll be working in teams to learn about the ideation process, which forms the foundations of new venture creation, in our Creative Challenge.

This module introduces learners to the field and practice of international business and management.

Drawing on classical and recent debates in theory and practice including, but not limited to commercial concerns, learners will be equipped with an understanding of the foundational principles and developments of the subject.

In the module, we consider how international business and management is researched, and facilitate a critical understanding based on real-life case studies in international contexts. This module gives learners the capacity to look at the past, present and future in organisations and provides the foundations for intellectual progression in the subject, and broadly, for year two and beyond.  

This module will provide you with an introduction to finance and accounting, covering the basic concepts and practicalities of corporate finance, the principles of valuation, financial management and business investment, the role and purpose of company accounts and their usefulness, security analysis, risk and returns from investments, and personal finance.

At all times the module content will be linked with financial behaviour and events in the real world.

This module includes two thematic parts which run in parallel across the semester. One part, Introduction to Tourism Studies, introduces tourism management as both, international business and as a global cultural phenomenon.

It provides insights into key concepts and theories to understand the intricacy of this industry in commercial, cultural and environmental terms. The other part, Managing People, focuses on the contemporary and practical issues of how people are organised and managed in the workplace and examines different theoretical perspectives which help our understanding of the complex relationship between the employer and the employee in the contemporary business environment.

The ICE Pathway - “Innovation, Commercialisation & Entrepreneurship”, where you'll learn about the Foundations of 'What is Business’.  Alongside:

• Personal & Professional Development: Who am I? How Do I learn? How do I lead & work in a team?
• Knowledge & Practice: What is a business/organisation? Why does this matter? How does this affect society?
• Experiential Learning: Real-world cases & clients; team-based and student-centered Learning approaches

This class aims to support you in developing key skills that are important to both your academic and future career. These include skills associated with:

• research
• data analysis
• critical writing
• team working
• communication

You'll take this class in semester 1 and are not expected to have any prior knowledge of psychology. It explores learning theory, developmental psychology, personality, biological psychology, and the scientific basis for psychology.

This class is taught in semester 2 and covers sensation and perception, cognitive psychology, social psychology, abnormal psychology, and research methods.

Topics

Semester 1 topics include:

• Working in Business Organisations
• Working Business Research & Consultancy
• Working Internationally
• Working in the Third Sector
• Rhetorics & Oratory

Semester 2 is about developing the proposal of MDP3; with a presentation and a final report.

Class description

The second year concentrates on developing understanding through industry-specific contextualisation. Sessions are weekly and three hours in length.

The sessions are thematically linked to the pathways for individualised experience in third year whilst also drawing on the theoretical knowledge developed in MDP 1. In order to develop understanding, organisations will deliver a half-day session. This consists of a one hour plenary introduction where the company and case study are introduced. This is followed by the group sessions where you undertake activities in relation to the case study set by the company.

This class reveals how our understanding of higher mental functions has been enhanced through:

• theoretical and experimental studies of normal human cognition
• neuropsychological studies of how cognitive functions may be damaged as a result of brain lesions

You'll be introduced to the main features of measurement, research design, and statistical analysis in psychology.

Following a general introduction, the course presents fundamental concepts, issues, and debates in the field of research methods.

You'll also become familiarised with the conceptual basis for inferential statistical testing, and introduced to different inferential statistics. Finally, a brief introduction to qualitative research methods takes place.

This class introduces social psychological theories and research that provide insights into why people believe what they believe, and why they behave the way they do.

Topics covered include attribution theory, aggression, prosocial behaviour, group influence, norms, conformity, obedience, and attitudes.

It ends with an introduction to health psychology, demonstrating how social psychological principles covered earlier in the class are applied to pressing, real-world health issues such as dietary behaviour, smoking/alcohol-use, and suicide.

The third year of centres on individualised experience in an organisational context through one of the following pathways:

• Internship/Charities - gain practical experience in a private or third sector organisation. You need to negotiate and locate your own organisation and experience – this is one of the key learning points of the pathway.
• Research and consultancy - a facility for local small businesses to gain from the experience and expertise of those within SBS. You work on two live business consultancy projects (one in each semester) and, as a team of 6, develop solutions and strategic initiatives for the local SME economy.
• International experience – only available for students who are undertaking an international exchange for either one semester or full year.
• Vertically Integrated Projects - working on a cross-faculty basis to research longitudinal projects (including the ‘Bill Gates Toilet Challenge, Solar Panels for Gambia and Enterprise in Schools) you work with a team of students from all levels of study (first year undergraduate to final year PhD) to further the work of the project.

In addition, you’re required to undertake a social responsibility element (this accounts for one quarter of the overall workload).

These have been designed to provide support to the Curriculum for Excellence and the Widening Access to Higher Education programme. There are no formal classes for MDP3 although there is pathway support with the pathway leads and tutor support.

This class builds on year 2 and equips you with a broader, more advanced set of methodological and analytic skills. These skills are essential for carrying out the year 4 dissertation and for being able to read and understand articles published in academic journals.

You're encouraged to think scientifically about conceptual and practical issues related to the study of individual differences, with specific reference to intelligence and personality. You'll gain the chance to put this knowledge into practice by designing your own measurement instrument.

You'll be introduced to some of the core topics in cognitive psychology

• Perception and action, particularly how we perceive time and recognise faces
• Memory and learning, including models of episodic and working memory
• Language, including word production, sentence comprehension, and discourse processing
• Thinking, specifically problem solving, deductive reasoning and judgement and decision making.

This class reviews the ways that children develop from infancy right through to the end of adolescence. Key theories are presented and used to explore the extent to which children’s development is continuous or stage-like and whether specific skills develop more quickly than others. Issues relating to infancy, ‘theory of mind’ (understanding others’ thoughts and beliefs), executive function (planning and monitoring abilities), language, and communication form the core themes in the class.

This class allows you to consider current ideas and positions within social psychology. Four themes drive the class

• Attitudes and attitude change, covering the Theory of Planned Behaviour and the Health Belief Model
• Identity, with a focus on social, personal and group identities
• Prejudice, connecting both attitudes and identities, and covering a broad range of areas such as social representations, stereotyping, prejudice and conflict
• Epistemology, where consideration is given to the theory of knowledge, how social psychological knowledge is produced, and to what effect

The purpose of this class is to provide the opportunity for you to learn the basic principles of brain function, and to encourage you to address the implications of this understanding for their own view of how behaviour is generated. It includes coverage of electrophysiology and psychopharmacology, neuroanatomy, research methods in neuroscience. There are focused sections relating to the visual system and the motor system.

In the third year econometrics class you’ll have learned about regression in both a cross-sectional data and time series data context. This class extends that knowledge in three ways.

First, for cross-sectional data, the class deals with regression techniques where the dependent variable may be restricted or limited in some way. In such cases, the regression model as taught in the third year class is not appropriate; this class develops models which are similar in spirit to the standard regression model, but can handle all of these cases.

A second purpose of Applied Econometrics is to develop regression methods which can be used when you have panel data - consisting of both cross-sectional and time-series dimensions.

Third, the class will build on the introduction to the econometrics of time series data developed in this class by developing two classes of models.

This class gives a balanced view of the role of finance in promoting long-run economic growth, but also booms and busts. The nature and role of financial intermediaries will be introduced, and, afterwards, formally addressed in a simple aggregate growth model. Empirical evidence will be examined, before turning to the specifics of micro-finance. The importance of financial globalisation will also be investigated. Finally, the rest of the class will be devoted to deciphering the causes and consequences of the current financial crisis.

Behavioural Economics offers alternative theories that merge psychological insights with economic theory and are based on experimental and other evidence, that attempt to provide a better explanation of real-world behaviour.

This class is concerned with exploring these new behavioural theories with the aim of providing you with an expanded toolkit with which to approach ‘real-world Economics’ that is based on the burgeoning Behavioural Economics literature that has emerged over the past two or three decades.

After studying this, you should be able to extend much of your previously-learned knowledge in Microeconomics in various directions that take into account more realistic ways of modelling how individuals behave.

The class provides you with an introduction to natural resource, environmental and energy economics and policy. It focuses on the contributions of economics to understanding environmental, energy and resource problems, their causes, and the design of effective public policies to counteract them.

The dissertation is an opportunity for you to undertake an original piece of research, closely supervised by a single member of staff. Planning for the dissertation begins in year 3, and dissertations can be of such high standards that they are subsequently published in peer-reviewed academic journals.

This class is offered by the Strathclyde Business School, and draws on current themes in Human Resource Management understood from the perspective of micro-organisational behaviour theory and research. Although the theoretical underpinning of the material covered is primarily about work and organisational issues at the level of individual behaviour in organisations, a contextual understanding of these issues is also encouraged.

Choice of topics may include:

• Belief & Anomalistic Experience
• The Psychology of Mental Health
• Artificial Intelligence
• Psychology & Ageing
• Psychology of Language
• Critical Review
• The Psychology & Cognitive Neuroscience of Face Recognition
• Neuropsychology of Ageing and Dementia
• Physiological Psychology
• Health Psychology
• Practical Aspects of Memory 

Students have the opportunity to undertake a 20 credit work placement class where they will have the opportunity to apply their academic knowledge and skills in a workplace setting, and develop both personally and professionally. Students are supported to find a suitable placement and throughout the experience. Previous placements have included: the NHS, Schools, University departments and third sector organisations such as health support and rehabilitation charities.

This class is an option which is available to a restricted number of students who'll apply to take part. It involves a placement with a European University partner working in a research team during the summer between years 3 and 4. Additional assessment is to be completed during semester 1 of year 4.