Winter Semester 2024/25
| Course Title | Instructor | Course Description | Link |
|
Exploring Political Representation of Minority Groups |
Vivien Fabry |
This course introduces students to the basic concepts of political representation like Pitkin and Saward. We will discuss different approaches and how these concepts are used to empirically study the representation of different minority groups from women to ethnic minority groups, to people with disabilities. The focus of this course lays on exploring the combination of theoretical concepts and methodological approaches to study minority representation. | Link |
|
Methods of Comparative Research |
Bruno de Castanho Silva | The aims of this course consist in making students familiar with the basic rules of doing comparative research and introducing the most influential approaches and salient topics in comparative social science. It will help students evaluate the methodological merits of sociological publications that use a comparative approach, and to design their own comparative research strategy. The course is divided into two parts: the first starts from the building blocks of how to formulate a research question and hypotheses, select appropriate units of analysis, discuss matters of conceptualization, operationalization and measurement, and the selection of appropriate methods and data. Given the increasing availability of cross-national surveys for sociological research, the second part of this course will focus on methods of data analysis for large-N comparative studies. At the end, students will be able to design and conduct a social scientific study, and to correctly interpret and understand quantitative sociological analysis. | Link |
| Introduction to Quantitative Analysis with R | Vivien Fabry | This course compliments the “Methods of Comparative Research” lecture and aims to introduce students to the freely available statistical programming software R. It starts from the beginning and prior programming experience is not needed. Students will learn the basics of R and how to use it for data analysis and visualization. They will also be introduced to various basic programming concepts and good practices to get the best out of R as a beginner. | Link |