Knowledge:
a. Students obtain up-to-date knowledge and insight in comparative research questions concerning the influence of social contexts on individuals.
Skills:
b. Students are able to raise adequate research questions about the influence of contextual characteristics on individual behaviours or attitudes in various Western and non-Western societies.
c. Students are able to derive hypotheses about individual and contextual effects from general theoretical notions.
d. Students are able to gather contextual information applicable in micro-level and macro-level designs.
e. Students are able to adequately deal with contextual information in empirical analyses using multilevel models.
f.  Students are able to report on analyses applying contextual data and to present and discuss the results before an audience of students and teachers.
Attitudes:
g. Students develop a critical attitude toward theoretical and methodological pitfalls in sociological research when doing contextual analyses and using multilevel analyses.
 

In a series of 2 four-week sessions students learn how to use contextual information in empirical sociological research papers. To prepare students adequately for these tasks, the course starts with a lecture in which the teachers provide the students with information on a trending sociological research topic. These lectures are the building blocks of two assignments in which students individually write an empirical paper in which they raise a comparative research question on the influence of contextual characteristics on individual behaviours, enrich individual data with contextual information, analyse these data, and report the results. In the first assignment cohort data obtained from CBS-StatLine are used as contextual information, in the second assignment the students obtain contextual data about countries from various available international sources. At the end of the course each student presents the results from one assignment in a conference setting.