Methods for Policy Analysis

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This course aims to familiarise students with the foundations of evaluating and designing academic, policy-relevant social science research. The course familiarises students with the process of designing their own research projects (such as their Master’s thesis), leading them through the intuition behind specific research design approaches that will support alignment among components such as research questions, methodological approach, theory, data, and data collection/analysis methods. The course will combine theoretical knowledge and hands-on applications, with students encouraged to build up the intuition and reasoning behind specific research design choices through lectures and tutorials focusing on study cases.

The study cases expose students to qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches, and students will focus in this course (which is the first of two skills courses) on building and consolidating knowledge related to quantitative methodological approaches. Hence, students will learn how to clean data and to describe its properties using statistics and visualization. The course also introduces basic forms of inferential statistics and ordinary least squares regression. Throughout the course, the Stata statistical package will be used, and students will build up hard skills related to this programme. The course prepares the student directly for Advanced Methods for Policy Analysis and Public Policy Analysis.