Quant Methods in Practice

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Juris Doctor, Undergraduate

This course is designed for graduate students interested in acquiring methodological and practical tools to pursue – and “consume" --- quantitative research in the social sciences. The course assumes limited to no exposure to empirical analysis in their undergraduate education and will actively link statistical reasoning to its most common applications in the social sciences and policy settings. The course starts with a discussion of research design, causation, and other methodological issues, such as the type of empirical questions posed in the social sciences and the answers that can be obtained from quantitative approaches. It then moves to more “practical” topics regarding data management and visualization, as well as descriptive inference. The third part of the course introduces inferential statistics, starting with sampling and probability theory and ending with regression analysis and other statistical techniques. The course thus provides a basic “toolbox” to conduct empirical research across different disciplines.