Students will develop research designs and learn how to collect, analyze, and present data. The course emphasizes hands-on training that will provide useful skills for academic and professional settings.
Class meets three times per week, often in a lecture format.
No prior data analysis or statistics background is necessary. The first half of the course focuses on questions of research design and on several research methods commonly used in political science, such as interviews, content analysis, and experiments. The second half of the course will be an introduction to quantitative methods mainly applied statistics. We will cover several methodological issues, including measurement and presentation, and basic statistical procedures, including confidence intervals, hypothesis testing, correlations, and regression. The emphasis in this section will be on achieving an intuitive understanding of the central concepts and basic competence in using computers for data analysis rather than on the memorization of formulas.