Subject Area: Social Research and Policy

The ability to conduct high quality quantitative research is a valuable skill for social scientists and applied social researchers. This course offers you a detailed introduction to quantitative research methods and data analysis. The first part of the course elaborates on major themes in research design (e.g., measuring social concepts, sampling, data collection) and common challenges (e.g., generalisability, bias, non-response, attrition). The second part introduces you to data analysis techniques commonly used by applied social researchers. We cover: basic descriptive statistics; sampling and distributions; comparisons of means; analysis of contingency tables and categorical association; and correlations. Strategies for presenting quantitative social research data are emphasised throughout the course.