30213
Graduate Course
WiSe 19/20: Research Designs and Methodologies
Christian von Scheve
Comments
This course is an introduction to sociological research designs and methodologies. The course will cover the entire research process, from finding adequate and theoretically informed research questions, to issues related to the operationalization and measurement of concepts, the design of empirical studies, and the principles of scientific inference. Most importantly, students will learn which kinds of research questions are best addressed using which research methods. This necessarily implies that the course covers a broad spectrum of methods, rather than focusing on a few select. At the same time, the course strongly emphasizes methodological rigor and fundamental principles that inform and discipline research designs and inference. Students will learn about inductive, deductive, and abductive reasoning in the research process, about causal inference, inference from part to whole, about issues of representation and comparison. We will deal with both qualitative and quantitative data and discuss, for example, interviews, ethnography, discourse analysis, controlled experiments, surveys, and historical methods. The course will strongly rely on in-class discussions of exemplary studies as well as on group work in which students develop their own research designs.
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Suggested reading
Preparatory Reading
- Mills, C.W. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
- King, G., Keohane, R.O., Verba, S. (1994). Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
- Ragin, C.C. (1994). Constructing Social Research: The Unity and Diversity of Method. Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press.
- Creswell, J.W. (2013). Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
16 Class schedule
Regular appointments
Wed, 2019-10-16 14:00 - 16:00
Wed, 2019-10-23 14:00 - 16:00
Wed, 2019-10-30 14:00 - 16:00
Wed, 2019-11-06 14:00 - 16:00
Wed, 2019-11-13 14:00 - 16:00
Wed, 2019-11-20 14:00 - 16:00
Wed, 2019-11-27 14:00 - 16:00
Wed, 2019-12-04 14:00 - 16:00
Wed, 2019-12-11 14:00 - 16:00
Wed, 2019-12-18 14:00 - 16:00
Wed, 2020-01-08 14:00 - 16:00
Wed, 2020-01-15 14:00 - 16:00
Wed, 2020-01-22 14:00 - 16:00
Wed, 2020-01-29 14:00 - 16:00
Wed, 2020-02-05 14:00 - 16:00
Wed, 2020-02-12 14:00 - 16:00