Students are able to:
- demonstrate a critical understanding of empirical research methods and how they relate to the political decision making;
- evaluate different types of research questions and choose the most appropriate data collection and analysis strategies to answer these questions;
- explain the relationship between concept and measurement;
- develop reliable and valid survey measures;
- distinguish and explain types of experiments;
- interpret quantitative and qualitative outputs and evaluate them based on different quality criteria
- formulate a research problem suitable for empirical research, and develop a related research design.
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This course exposes students to a variety of methods and data analytic tools to enable them to understand and evaluate empirical research relevant for political decision-making, and the description and explanation of social phenomena. After a short introduction of the philosophical foundations and assumptions of empirical methodology and research practice, this course focuses on the development, application and interpretation of empirical research. At first, different aspects of scientific integrity relevant for empirical research are discussed, followed by the development of a research plan. The research plan contains a problem formulation (specified in research questions, aim and conceptual model) and a research design (research strategy, operationalisation of concepts, data-collection, analyses and report of findings). A distinction is made between different types of empirical research (fundamental versus practice oriented) and different approaches (analytic and interpretative), as well as different research designs (survey, experiments and ethnographic fieldwork). Special attention is given to different forms of reliability and validity of measurements and observations. All this will be illustrated with examples of recent empirical research related to topics discussed elsewhere in the Philosophy, Politics and Society (PPS) programme: concepts of democracy; models of separation between religion and state; attribution of and attitudes towards poverty; and social conflict.
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