Methods of Social Research

The course aims at making students familiar with the key problems, tools and techniques of social research, in order to enable them to structure and conduct basic research projects. Also, an additional key goal is to allow students to competently and critically read, understand and contextualize the results of empirical research in the social sciences.

The course examines the different stages of the lifecycle of a typical social research, with a specific emphasis on the quantitative analysis of individual-level data. After the initial discussion of what is social research, along with different research approaches, the course examines the fundamental topic of research design, along with the formulation, based on theory, of empirically testable hypotheses. The problem of the operationalization of theoretical concepts is then discussed, allowing the presentation of different types of variables, as well as the role of indicators for measuring concepts. A focus is then dedicated to the study of individuals: sampling issues; the use of the structured questionnaire; different types of questions and scales (students are then confronted with the development of a questionnaire). Other types of data are then discussed, along with qualitative research methods and techniques. Finally, an introduction to quantitative data analysis is presented, covering univariate, bivariate and multivariate analysis.