Strategies of Political Inquiry, Government 2010

Gary King, Robert Putnam, and Sidney Verba: not offered this academic year. If you could learn only one thing in graduate school, it should be how to do scholarly research. You should be able to assess the state of a scholarly literature, identify interesting questions, formulate strategies for answering them, have the methodological tools with which to conduct the research, and understand how to write up the results so they can be published. Although many graduate level courses address these issues of research design indirectly, we provide an explicit analysis of each. We take empirical evidence to be historical, quantitative, or anthropological and focus on the theory of descriptive and causal inference underlying both quantitative and qualitative research. Primarily for graduate students and undergraduates preparing for senior thesis research.