This course introduces students to more advanced quantitative (and mixed-methods) research designs. These designs provide social researchers with an ability to understand social problems with greater complexity, moving from findings that are descriptive to those that allow for an interpretation of the interaction of multiple variables, which combine multiple forms of data, and which provide some basis for determining quantitative causation.
All social phenomena are inherently complex, involving interconnections between individuals, institutions and structural factors, which involve non-linear interactions that are dynamic, change over time and which vary across contexts. This seminar introduces students to some research designs that can capture this complexity, focusing primarily on more advanced quantitative research designs, with some time devoted to mixed-methods research designs.
Students are initially introduced to various critical traditions in quantitative research and the logics of mixed-methods research designs. These include critical realism, critical quantitative inquiry and person-centred quantitative analysis, with a focus on outlining the value and limits of different traditions in quantitative research, kinds of research designs, and of the data obtained from different research designs, contextualised in critical and reflective consideration of different research traditions.
The seminar is then structured around specific ways of designing more complex quantitative (and mixed-methods) research, with a focus on practical examples and applications of these research designs (including complex survey, quasi-experiments, longitudinal surveys, convergent, explanatory sequential, exploratory sequential and embedded mixed-methods designs).
Students will critically analyse published examples of research designs. However the seminar focus will be on students developing a feasible research design for their own Master thesis research.
This includes developing analytical strategies, that either apply multivariate quantitative analyses or which combine qualitative and quantitative data, with some performance of corresponding statistical analyses using SPSS (Statistical Programme for the Social Sciences).
- Dozent/in: Tobia Fattore