300190 Lehrforschung: Intergenerational & life course research in practice (International Track) (LEH) (SoSe 2016)

This 2-semester course deals with longitudinal research designs. Basically, such designs are concerned with the impact of demographical or economic life events (divorce, unemployment etc.) on subjective or objective indicators (income, life-satisfaction). The course intends to convey a comprehensive understanding into the conceptual and theoretical framework of such basic life-course designs. It also deals with extensions of basic life-course analysis: intergenerational research designs (how are parental characteristics associated with children’s outcome variables?) and lagged life course designs (how does political participation during youth affect labour market or educational outcomes during adult life?). Furthermore, it extensively discusses the potential of longitudinal analyses to validate causality.
On the practical level, the course provides an in-depth introduction into the management and analysis of longitudinal data. The participants will be introduced to the Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) and learn how to handle and analyze this data via the statistical program stata. The participants will be guided on their way from the formulation of a longitudinal research question to the production and documentation of a longitudinal analysis.
In the first part of the course (SS 16), theoretical concerns about life-course and intergeneration research are discussed. Furthermore, participants learn how to manage SOEP data, will formulate a research hypothesis and perform & present some first descriptive analyses. Each session has to be prepared on the basis of regular assignments. During the semester break, students shall write a preliminary draft of their research paper. Presentation and preliminary paper will count 30 per cent (15/15) of the final grade.
The second part of the course (WS 16/17) deals with multivariate models of longitudinal questions (difference-estimators, fixed effects estimators) and advanced issues of longitudinal data management (linked life-course data, event-history data, weighting of longitudinal data). The participants will refine their paper during this part of the course. The finalized research paper, to be provided in March 2017, will count 70% of the final grade.
Participants shall be familiar with the basics of stata and simple regression techniques.