Scope and Methods of Political Science.
This course is an introduction to the process of conducting research in political science. My goals in this course are to help you learn to think systematically about the political science topics in which you are interested, develop the skills necessary to put your ideas to the test, and to be able to critically evaluate the research of others. To do this, we will examine the central aspects of the empirical study of politics: hypothesis testing, measurement, inference, causation, research design. We will also learn about several different methods of gathering data using both quantitative and qualitative approaches, including experiments, surveys, content analysis, and case studies.