Research Methods

A comprehensive course in Research Methods gives a broad rather than deep presentation of relevant methodological tools and issues. The part dealing with quantitative research methods will survey the most commonly used quantitative analysis in the social sciences such as an introduction to SPSS, factor analysis, regression and correlation analysis, multiway contingency tables and social network analysis. The qualitative session covers topics such as ethnographic and anthropological methods frominterviewing to analyses, naturalistic inquiry, interpretive research, case-studies, groundedtheory and various approaches to categorization of data. In addition each program will have specific mini-sessions on research methods. The PIMS program will have a session on Item, Scale and Survey construction to prepare students to do survey-based studies. The PING program will have a session introducing STATA and applied econometric methods used on various data sources such as CIS and patent data.