300513 Reading and Understanding Empirical Research: Methods & Results (S) (WiSe 2015/2016)

Scientific papers always include the current state of research of an interesting objective. Regarding the large amount of different published articles in the social science it is not always easy to select the most relevant publications. For a successful selection it is inevitable to understand the research approaches concerning the hypotheses, the chosen methods and the interpretation of the results and not to trust in the authors descriptions of the main conclusions in the abstract of each article.
Participants of this course will learn a critical handling with existing research publications. The focus will lay on the use of different quantitative methods and the critical interpretation of the results. Therefore we will read different articles and review the used method(s) in terms of the statistical background and the meaning of the results. Viewed and refreshed methods will be for example descriptive statistics, different types of regression analysis, variance analysis and factor analysis.
Additional Recommendation: The practical training of the methods with the statistical software STATA within the linked Tutorial 300523

Requirements for participation, required level

Master Students Sociology