SOCIAL AND POLITICAL RESEARCH METHODS

This course will focus on social and political data analysis.
The main important methods and techniques of data collection (and analysis) in social research will be addressed. Many important questions in political science cannot be addressed with quantitative methods. Often times, scholars cannot rely on suitable statistical data to answer their research questions. Moreover, the limited resources of individual researchers frequently preclude the collection of a sufficient number of empirical observations required for statistical analysis. Therefore, qualitative methods of data collection and analysis are an important part of everyday research in our field. For this reason, half of the course will be dedicated to these methods, while the other half will focus on the quantitative approach.
In the first part of the course, the two paradigms of ‘positivism’ and ‘interpretivism’ will be presented, from an ontological and an epistemological point of view.
Then, different aspects of the first approach will be presented: Causality and Experimentation, The Survey, Official Statistics and SNA.
In the second part, we will discuss the most important qualitative techniques of data collection are addressed (interviews, document and text analysis, etc).
The seminar concludes with a session on the triangulation of different methods and ethical issues.