809386

Professor Susana Borrás, Department of Business and Politics, CBS

Associate Professor Antje Vetterlein, Department of Business and Politics, CBS

Associate Professor Nicholas Charron, Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg

The purpose of the course is to provide the PhD students with hands-on skills and an overview of key issues regarding research design and methods in the social sciences. Students will learn about and apply concepts of social science research design and learn to present these concepts in their own dissertations and future research articles. While students will inevitably specialize in a limited number of methods in their own work, the course is designed to give a broad overview of issues concerning a wide range of issues and pitfall in social science inquiry.  One never knows what type of research one might be doing in ten years!

The course will begin with readings and discussions about research and the study of causation in the social sciences. The first session will therefore focus on what is a good research question, as well as theory and theory building in the social sciences. Next, we will talk about how one frames the research question in to a broader context – namely, what makes a good literature review? We will then discuss how one should think about operationalization of one’s concepts, issues around measurement – including the concepts of validity (internal and external) and reliability. Next we will discuss the basics of a research design, and how the design of the research should be structured. After that we will delve into some specific methods associated to different research designs, namely, comparative research, as well as some key qualitative and quantitative research methods, and how these are part and parcel of specific models of research design. Hence, we will be looking into some specific designs from which students can choose in addressing their research questions. These include: small-N case study work, interviews and content analysis, experimental and quasi-experimental designs, counterfactuals, statistical-large-N research and– discussing the advantages, and common problems associated with each type of design.

The course is intended for students at the PhD level, and will be as ‘applied’ as possible. The students will therefore be asked to take the key topics discussed in the course and apply them to their own work, presenting their progress in pairs or individually to the group.

Students will therefore be expected to present and share their work as applied to this course during the term.

The course is divided into two parts:
• Part one will be held in 3 full consecutive days, and will deal with the most important issues issues of research design, and

• Part two will be held in 3 full consecutive days, and will focus on giving an overview of research methods, and the final workshop with the students.

Paper and assignment during the course:
In order to keep it ‘hands on’, the students have to prepare a paper before the course starts, as a precondition for attendance. The paper will be of max. 3.000 words and will be submitted to the course coordinator (Susana Borrás), latest 21 August. This paper will be the basis for the presentations and discussions during Part one of the course. The paper does not need to be original. It can be a copy/summary of the PhD project description/synopsis. It should contain the following elements of the student own PhD dissertation: a short introduction/problem formulation, the main research question (and sub-questions if relevant), a short presentation of the theory/ies that guide the dissertation, a short description of the methods and data to be used.

During the 1rst and 2nd part of the course, the students will have time (a bit more than one month) to revise that paper on the basis of what they have learnt during Part one, and submit a revised paper (to Susana Borras) before Part two commences (before 3 October). That revised paper will be the basis for the discussions in the final workshop in Part two, where they will get substantive feedback about their projects. The revised paper should not be longer than 5.000 words.

The goal is to sharpen the research design in the PhD dissertations and/or individual research papers. To that end we will set aside sufficient time to carefully examine and discuss the papers submitted by the participants.

Therefore the course will be in seminar format, with a mix of lecturing, teacher-student discussions and student presentations of their own research and subsequent assignments during the course.

PART I

Day 1: Monday 29 August

9.00 - 12.00: Introduction, Research Questions and Literature Reviews (Susana Borrás)

13:00 - 16:00: PhD student presentations (Susana Borrás)

Day 2: Tuesday 30 August

9.00 - 12.00:  Framing theories, deriving hypothesis, operationalization of concepts, and issues related to measurement (Susana Borrás)

13.00 - 16.00: PhD student presentations (Susana Borrás) 

Day 3: Wednesday 31 August

9.00 - 12.00:  Key methodological issues in comparative research (Susana Borrás) 

13.00 - 16.00: PhD student presentations (Susana Borrás) 

PART II

Day 4: Monday 3 October 

9.00 - 12.00: Case Studies and Small-N (Antje Vetterlein)

13:00 - 16:00: Interview and Content Analysis (Antje Vetterlein) 

Day 5: Tuesday 4 October

9.00 - 12.00: Large-N Quantitative Designs and Experiments (Nicholas Charron)

13:00 - 16:00: Survey Research (Nicholas Charron) 

Day 6: Wednesday 5 October

9.00 - 11:15: Summary of key topics (Susana Borrás, Antje Vetterlein, Nicholas Charron)

11:45 - 12:30: PhD student presentations of final paper and feed back (Susana Borrás, Antje Vetterlein, Nicholas Charron) 

13.30 - 17:00 PhD student presentations of final paper and feed back (Susana Borrás, Antje Vetterlein, Nicholas Charron) 

• Learn to better define and shape a research question

• Learn to position their work in a larger context within their respective literature and to critically assess this literature and show why their work is relevant.

• Improve skills in operationalizing concepts relevant to their work, thinking about validity and reliably of measures.

• Develop alternative research designs and to strengthen their skills within more familiar designs.

• Integrate the concepts learnt in the course into their own PhD projects and make a presentation of your work on the final workshop day.