Advocates of the research teaching nexus argue that engaging students in research offers an important way for students to develop more critical relations to knowledge (Jenkins and Healey 2005; Brew 2006). However, this argument is based on the assumption that there is a relation between students’ understandings of academic knowledge and their experiences of research. In this paper, we examine this assumption by analysing the relations between sociology students’ accounts of sociological knowledge (what they think Sociology is as a discipline, which we have reported in Ashwin et al. in press) and their approaches to conducting sociological research (how they report the outcomes of a research project, which we are currently analysing). This is based on a phenomenographic analysis (Marton and Booth 1997; Åkerlind 2005) of interviews with 15 sociology undergraduate students over the course of their undergraduate degrees and of the texts of their final year, research-based, dissertations. Based on this analysis, we will examine the implications for our analysis for the research-teaching nexus. This paper draws on data from the ESRC-funded Pedagogic Quality and Inequality in University First Degrees Project, which investigated sociology and related social science degree courses in four English universities.