(PhD) Research Methods

This course addresses the fundamentals of research in the social sciences: theory, research design, methods, and critique. It is designed for Ph.D. students who wish to undertake research publishable in scholarly social science journals. We will discuss a variety of research methods with a specific focus on experiments and experimental designs. We will cover hypothesis generation, experimental and quasi-experimental research designs, and different types of validity as well as reliability of independent and dependent measures. By the end of the course, you should be able to plan a program of research including generating and framing the research question, motivating the research, designing hypotheses as well as experiments to test the hypotheses, and developing data collection instruments (we will not discuss data analysis techniques in this course). We will also practice how to read papers with a critical eye and how to critique research done by others by focusing on the key issues that underlie robust, replicable, and rigorous research.