Time Schedule:
Anne F. Peterson
BPOLST 502
Bothell Campus
Surveys important aspects of social science research for academic and practical investigation. Focuses on gaining an understanding of research and statistical analyses and their relationship to policy concerns. Prerequisite: minimum grade of 2.7 in BPOLST 500. Offered: W.
Class description
This course is the first in a series of two courses offered through the MAPS program intended to train graduate students with becoming producers of information, i.e. a policy researcher. This course begins your training by surveying important aspects of the conduct of research into social scientific questions. This course lays the basic foundation for both academic and practical investigation. There are many benefits to taking this class that go beyond merely understanding statistical relationships.
There are several important goals tied to this course: 1. You will gain an understanding of research and statistical analyses and their intrinsic relationship to policy concerns. 2. You will be able to call upon a wide variety of skills to analyze data, including descriptive statistics, statistical inference, the meaning and analyses of using confidence intervals, test statistics, and p-values. Throughout your academic and policy career you will build upon your tool kit. 3. You will become more sophisticated in learning how to model data. 4. This class will put you in an excellent position to create innovative capstone projects in your second year. 5. You will become proficient with using SPSS 9.0 (SPSS 11.0) and Windows Excel programs. These are important job skills that you can offer an employer, or take with you to use in further graduate study. 6. And finally, this class will help strengthen your competency in becoming a policy analyst in the MAPS program in both academic and policy arenas.
My plan as your instructor is to discuss the basic logic of each topic, along with some examples of techniques that are particularly useful to policy and social science analysts. This class will provide you with information that will allow you to conduct further study on your own as you navigate your way through choosing and executing future research projects in upcoming classes, and most importantly, your capstone project.
Student learning goals
General method of instruction
Lecture; online assignments; computer based workshops
Recommended preparation
Introduction to Statistics class
Class assignments and grading
Weekly homework, quizzes, exam
