Course info

PS 602 is a core research course for graduate students in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration. The course builds on the knowledge and skills developed by the students through a foundational course PS 601, Principles and Methods in Social Science Research. It is assumed that the students are well equipped with the basic concepts and techniques required to identify researchable research problems, conceptualizing the phenomena that need to be studied, review existing research, and making informed choices from a broad menu of existing qualitative and quantitative research designs and methods to answer the identified research problems. With this, the course will not focus on the basic concepts of social science research. These concepts should have helped the students to develop their research proposals, which they will continue working on and submit for grading by the end of the 13^th week of the semester.

 

In this course, more attention will be paid to developing the competencies required to develop data analysis plans and choose suitable measures for the phenomena under investigation. However, recognizing that PS 601 concentrated much on understanding the key epistemological and ontological questions that underlie social science research, a few of the discussion sessions will be on the basic quantitative research designs and methods. In addition, the principles and conditions determining the choice of statistical tests and measures will be examined. Finally, students will be guided to walk through the process of data management and analysis for both qualitative and quantitative research studies to ensure that reliability, validity, credibility, and trustworthiness are enhanced in executing their research projects.

 

Unlike PS 601, the present course will seek to develop practical competencies relevant to data management and analysis including data transcription, coding, cleaning, reduction, processing, applying valid statistical tests, interpretation, and presentation of results. Students will also learn how to use data to accomplish different research purposes such as describing situations, establishing the relationship between and among variables, predicting future possibilities, determining the strengths of relationship based on statistical results and evidence from qualitative sources.