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Welcome to Political Science 585 Course Description Political Science 585 is a course about the process of scientific inquiry as is used in contemporary political science research. This course is designed to do more than give you some rudimentary background on how to "crunch numbers". While we will be doing some work with data as well as using some contemporary statistical software, there is so much more to Political Science than the math. Where we do use math, typically the computers will do most of the heavy lifting (although you will be required to do some simple calculations as well as memorize a few formulas). More important in this course - and ultimately to your grade, is that you walk away confident in your knowledge of the research process: how to ask good questions and how to find good answers. I hope that by the end of the course you will be able to do the following: critically analyze most academic papers, understand best practice research methods of data collection, evaluate data presented in the media, to create and analyze your own data to help augment term papers, to understand some basics of statistics, and most important design good research. |
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