Social Research Methods

Faculty

H. Ishida

Description

Social surveys and social research methods have been established as effective tools for social science investigation in recent period. Social surveys collect raw data from the primary field. This course examines various methods of conducting social surveys. Participants will construct hypotheses, conduct small-scale survey on questions related to the hypotheses, input the survey data, clean the data set, and analyze the collected data set. In addition, the participants will conduct secondary analysis of the large-scale national survey data set which can be obtained from the data archive and will learn how to apply different analytical techniques to the survey data.

The course first examines the papers which analyzed social survey data, and the participants will have hands-on experience of collecting and analyzing data set. The participants will be divided into groups according to their interests, and the data collection and analysis will be done as a group. In the course of the analysis of data, brief introduction to statistical software (stata) and introductory lectures on basic statistical analysis will be provided. The ultimate goal of this course is to write a social science monograph using social survey data.

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