The course will be a step-by-step approach to research design. Beginning with a general approach to how we know what we know and to the role of paradigms and theories in constructing research questions, the course will then turn to ethical issues involved in human and social research. We will then look in-depth at research design as a holistic approach and to conceptualization and operationalization as indispensable phases of research, allowing us to concretely study virtually any question related to society and to human affairs imaginable, so long as our question and our categories are constructed precisely enough. We will then discuss how to collect data of various types, how to “interrogate” data, choosing the best method for doing so with different kinds of data.
The course will be primarily focused on qualitative approaches, particularly of use to students of Political Science, International Affairs, History, Sociology and related fields, but will also include some introduction to the use of and ability to understand quantitative approaches, as well as mixed approaches to research. Students will be considered primarily as consumers of statistics, rather than producers of them, but we will also explore how quantitative data are generated. Questions of how to study cultural questions, community and ethnographic studies, and participant observation will be covered. We will also look at journalistic and historical approaches to research. We will spend the last part of the course learning about how to write properly, how to cite and how to present one’s work.
Students will follow a firm schedule for developing their research project for the course, will meet firm deadlines for topics, preferred method of study, literature review, identification of appropriate data sources and their availability, operationalization of concepts, commencement of research activity and data collection, and presentation of the project to the class.