Formation/Cours

This course is designed to familiarize students to different methods/ways of doing research, and thus to inspire them for the writing of their MA thesis. For this reason, the idea is to have all sessions “squeezed” at the beginning of September, so that students are exposed early on to these different methods. All sessions will take place between Monday 9 September and Friday 14th (please check Hyperplanning for exact times and locations).

The sequence of the lectures is organized in the following logic. The first session is a refreshment on “research design”: what is a ‘good’ research question and how do I plan the related research. The second session introduces students with different ways in which scholars engage with big ideas.

In sessions 3 and 4, students will learn about case study research and the practice of field research.

In sessions 5 to 7, students will be presented different methods of qualitative research (QCA, process tracing and interviews).

Sessions 8 to 10 are dedicated to different ways of analysing discourse/text, moving gradually from more qualitative to more quantitative approaches.

Sessions 11 and 12 are dedicated to quantitative research. More specifically, in session 11 students will be familiarised with public opinion datasets and with how they can generate meaningful graphs from them in Excel

In session 12, students will learn about why and how it is sometimes wishful/useful to use statistical methods to analyse political/social phenomena.