Students will learn to conduct social science research. Students will advance through: (1) framing the research question; (2) conducting a relevant literature review; (3) formulating hypotheses; (4) examining various modes of data collection; (5) specifying a methodology; (6) considering ethical issues; and (7) detailing various data analysis techniques. Different types of qualitative and quantitative research designs and methodologies will be presented. There will be emphasis on writing a research proposal and on selecting the appropriate design and methods for a given research problem. In addition, this course will provide a thorough grounding in statistical practices. Concepts, principles, and methods of statistics from two perspective, description and inferential, will be presented. Statistical topics include describing and displaying data, measures of central tendency and dispersion, standard scores and distributions, correlation, simple-linear regression, mean comparisons, analysis of variance, and chi-square.
Special Topics in Social Sciences.