Course Description
Introduces students to research design and basic quantitative analysis, with substantive examples geared towards comparative and international politics. Topics include how to construct theories in social science, causality, inference, descriptive statistics, measures of bivariate association, and multivariate linear regression.
Athena Title
Research Design and Analysis
Pre or Corequisite
INTL 3200 or INTL 3200E or INTL 3300
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
This course exposes students to basic concepts related to research design and quantitative analysis. The course first familiarizes students with the process of constructing and testing social scientific explanations for political phenomena. Students will then develop an understanding of the basic components of research design: how to measure abstract concepts, how to examine correlations, the possibility of spurious relationships and how to address them. In the latter part of the course, students will learn to perform simple data analysis, beginning with practical issues of data management. By the end of the course, students will be comfortable performing analysis to examine relationships between variables, including cross-tabulation and linear regression. A large portion of students’ grades will be determined by lab exercises that involve performing data analysis themselves.
Topical Outline
Research Design • theories in social science • causal relationships and threats to inference • experimental and observational designs • measurement Quantitative Analysis • data management • descriptive statistics • cross-tabulation • t-tests • covariance and correlation • scatterplots/data visualization • bivariate linear regression • multivariate linear regression
Syllabus