Books:
Neuman, W. Lawrence. The Basics of Social Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches, current edition.
Depending on focus, I may supplement readings with another current text.
Grade Breakdown:
Exercise Sets (10 in all) 50% Annotated Bibliography 15% Data Analysis (group project) 30% Participation 5% TOTAL 100%
Course Content:
What is Social Science?
-The rise of social research
-Can human behavior
be studied scientifically?
-How and why social
research is conducted
THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL RESEARCH
Thinking (Social)
Scientifically
-What "soft" science borrows from the
"hard" sciences
-What sets social science apart
Theory Building and Evaluation as Our Ultimate Goals
-Components of theory
-Successfully testing theory
-What theory gets us
Keeping It
Clean: Ethics in Social Research
-The power of research and its (mis)uses
-Preventing harm, responding to harm
PROCEEDING WITH SOCIAL RESEARCH
The Science of Social Science (I): What We Seek
-Building hypotheses
-The never-ending quest
to explain variation
Reviewing the Literature: What Those Before Have Sought
-Mining bibliographies
and footnotes
-How to effectively use
a library
-Can the Internet be trusted?
The Science of Social Science (II): How We Try to Get It
-What we try to measure
and how we measure it
-Problems of reliability and
validity
The Science of Social Science (III): Sampling from a Population
-Sloppy sampling: is it ever OK?
-The esteemed status of random
sampling
QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS
Observation: Seeing is Believing?
-How to extract information
from primary sources
-Direct versus indirect
observation
Document Analysis: Should You Believe Everything You Read?
-Using secondary sources
-How reliable are written
records?
QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS
Surveys and Interviews: Should You Take Their Word?
-Interviewing elites and
the mass public
-Survey design do's and don'ts
Experimentation: Can You Trust the Subjects?
-Promise and peril of manipulated
reality
-Experimentation in the field
Secondary Analysis: Making Someone Else's Hard Work Your Data
-Content analysis: amassing data from
text
-Statistics and documents: exploiting
bureaucracy
Quantitative Data Analysis: Just for Number Crunchers?
-Measuring central tendency and
dispersion
-Comparing two
variables: crosstabs and regression
-Multiple regression
CONCLUDING SOCIAL RESEARCH
Finalizing a Social Research Report
-Format of a conference paper, article,
report, etc.
-Remembering the bigger picture