Week 1 Essay

Week 1 Essay Week 1 Essay POL 201 Quantitative Research Methods in Political Science  © Colin Whelan 2013 THE BASICS POL I 201: Research methods in political science am Colin Whelan cew6@sfu.ca Tentative ofï ¬ ce hours: Tuesdays 12:30-2:15 (after class) or by appointment Labs start week 2 FORMAT OF THE COURSE Labs Homeworks Quizzes Exams R R is the statistical software we will use in this course Instructions syllabus to download and install it are included in the It is a difï ¬ cult software to learn but I use it for two main reasons: It is free It forces you to understand what you are doing KELLSTEDT AND WHITTEN The main textbook for the course Readings Make There are not too long, generally easy to read sure to read thoroughly though! are readings for week 1 and 2 (sorry!) For week 1: Focus on 1.3; and 2.2-2.4 The rest is important; but is mainly good background info First quiz next week! SOME VOCAB Research Question: an empirical question about why or how some phenomenon varies Research questions should be general Research questions should be about all relevant cases Notice that we are studying variation. Variation can be over time or across different cases. Each case is a unit of analysis We measure the concepts as variables VARIABLES Variables require some variation in the concept of interest If our unit of analysis is people, than species is not a variable; if it were animals, species would be a variable Variables map a concept to a measurement, we call this operationalization For any research question we differentiate between: The Dependent Variable; and Other Independent Variables VARIABLES EXAMPLES We use the term variable to refer to both the concept in theory, and the measurement of the concept in our dataset. Here are some examples: Concept Measure Economic status GDP per capita Ideology left-right scale Rights and freedoms POLITY IV Policy preference A Likert scale TWO EXAMPLES DO VOTERS GET MORE CONSERVATIVE AS THEY AGE? Source: 2008 Canadian Election Study DO