The course aims at providing students with the main practical and conceptual tools of research design as well as to illustrate them a number of different data source, data collection and data analysis methods. Along with theoretical explanations and practical exercises, the course will include the presentation of best practices and exemplary research cases that will span over the different sub-fields of political science (from IR and conflict studies to electoral politics, from EU politics to public opinion research, from comparative politics to policy analysis).
The course will cover the following topics:
- The logic of research
- Asking questions: literature, theories, and research questions
- Hypotheses testing and measurement: from concepts to numbers
- Interviews
- Surveys
- Focus groups
- Content/text analysis
- Political ethnography
- Experiments
- Docente: PAMELA PANSARDI