Students will be prepared for fieldwork within Agroecology. The course will teach students how to: plan field work, select a methodological approach to a research question, plan the process of retrieving and structuring data, and carry out the subsequent critical analysis of material and ideas.
The course will also prepare students for writing and revising their thesis.

Examples of methods with which students will become acquainted are: semi-structured interviews and manual analysis, as well as computer-aided software for analysing qualitative data, quantitative statistics, general systems’ principles diagramming and emergy synthesis, environmental accounting and biological indicators.

The course will:
- Include practice in designing appropriate research and development processes in accordance with the research topic selected.
- Discuss ethical research issues.
- Provide procedures for data collection and analysis.
- Familiarize students with methods and tools within the field of agro-ecology.
- Provide students, individually or in pairs, with the possibility to try methods and tools in practice.
- Develop skills for thesis writing according to the chosen methodology.

The topic of the Master’s thesis project and the case study will be selected by students in consultation with supervisors and the examiner at SLU.