Political Science 328 - ResearchMethods/Poli&SocSci

This course provides students with a strong grounding in the logic of research design with respect to a wide range of social science research methods. Students will gain practical, hands-on experience with many of the ways that social scientists collect, measure, analyze, and make sense of data collected from people or the everyday routines of social, political, and economic institutions. Examples of methods covered include experiments, surveys, semi-structured interviews, focus groups, coding of online and archival text sources, and social network analysis. The course encourages students to think critically and carefully about measurement reliability and validity, internal research design validity, and generalizability, or external research design validity. Students will learn to identify threats to research validity and reliability associated with these different research approaches. Students will also use Qualtrics and mTurk to collect data. Satisfies the Integrative Experience requirement for BA-PolSci majors.

Open sophomore, junior, and senior Political Science students. This course is being offered as part of the UMass Flex Initiative. That means students have the opportunity to attend class in person or online. For questions about modality please contact the instructor for more information.