Res Meth in Democracy/Devt

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

How do we know what we know about democracy and how should we evaluate what we think we know? This is a course on methods and research design in the social sciences with an emphasis on democracy, democratization, and development. The goal of this course is to provide students with sturdy foundations in the logics of social inquiry. This is an essential skill that will further your ability to consume and evaluate scholarly knowledge, conduct your own research, design policy and programs, and monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of past policies and programs. During this course you will learn how to create a useful research question, to develop, refine and test hypotheses, and operationalize concepts. Moreover, we will contrast different methods toward social inquiry and examine their relative pitfalls when it comes to the tricky question of establishing causality. Concurrently, students will gain important exposure to some key works on democracy and democratization that exemplify different methodological choices. The course is run as a mixture of a graduate seminar and graduate workshop. Part of the class is dedicated to lecture and a discussion of the building blocks of research design and the contrasting methodological choices a researcher must make. A second part of the class will be devoted to working more intensely on your own research designs, using class time to troubleshoot problems, peer-review, and critique each other’s work.