Module description
King, Keohane, and Verba (1994) once wrote that ‘the method is the content.’ It is a controversial position to hold and not one that I expect any student on this course to necessarily agree with, but as a pithy way to sum up the importance of formal methods in social research it is pretty powerful. On most courses that you attend you will be focussed on what research tells us about a particular subject. For example, you will more than likely come into contact with various explanations of voting behaviour or why states cooperate on some areas of policy but not others. But how do we know, what we know? If I say that working class voters in Europe vote for parties of the left, how do I know that is true? And just how certain am I of that statement?
The purpose of this course is to furnish you with the skills you need to understand how knowledge is created in the social sciences – to understand how we know, what we know. This is done by learning, assessing, and debating the different techniques that researchers use to generate knowledge with a specific focus on the methods used to collect and analyse evidence. In doing so, you will become more confident when engaging with primary research. You will begin to question not just the outcomes of research, but also the way in which it was conducted in the first place which will help to improve your ability to critically reflect on academic sources in all of your modules. You will also take your first steps as independent researchers and by the end of the module you will be in a position to design rigorous research projects using appropriate methods to answer important questions in political science. For those of you hoping to complete a dissertation in your final year, the skills that you acquire on this module will be invaluable.
Assessment details
One 2000 word data analysis (45%) and one 2500 word research proposal (55%)
Educational aims & objectives
The aims of this module are:
- To further students’ understanding of how research is conducted in the social sciences.
- To give students’ the foundational methodological skills which they can use to develop their own research.
Learning outcomes
By the end of this course students will:
- Be familiar with the major approaches and methods used in political science research.
- Understand when to use a particular method to answer a question and also how another method might produce a different answer.
- Be able to relate political theory to empirical research.
- Have a firm grasp of the process of research design.
- Understand how to produce cohesively structured reports in political science.
- Develop a basic knowledge of how to use popular software packages for social research.
- Become familiar with the language of political research.
Teaching pattern
One hour lecture, one hour seminar per week
Indicative teaching schedule
Week 1: The importance of research design
Week 2: Theory building and concept formation
Week 3: Establishing causality
Week 4: Case Studies
Week 5: Comparing cases and the comparative method
Week 6: Fieldwork Fundamentals
Week 7: Data basics: Types of data and operationalizing concepts
Week 8: Descriptive statistics
Week 9: Presenting data and bivariate relationships
Week 10: Writing about statistics and an introduction to regression
Suggested reading list
The following books are useful purchases for many of your modules and will provide required readings for some weeks of this module.
- King, Gary, Robert O. Kehoane, and Sidney Verba. 1994. Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
- Kellstedt, Paul. M, and Guy D. Whitten. 2009 and 2013. The Fundamentals of Political Science Research. New York: Cambridge University Press
- Marsh, David, and Gerry Stoker (eds.). 2010. Theory and Methods in Political Science. London: Palgrave Macmillan