SS-301 Research Design

3 Credits

How do we create valid, objective, empirical knowledge about other people, the past, and socialand environmental relations? What practices and methods support research in the socialsciences, human history, and cultural analysis, from anthropology and sociology to psychologyand political science? This course explores how statistics, ethnography, interviewing, and otherempirical methods are used in the social sciences, their limits, and their predictive andinterpretive power. It introduces quantitative and qualitative research methods that students willemploy to formulate research problems, systematically plan research experiences, evaluatefindings, and produce arguments and results, while examining the relation between empiricalresearch, social theory, and creative endeavors.