About This Course
30 hours plus conference; 3 credits
Quantitative concepts and methods, including computer and other techniques used in large-scale surveys. Techniques of social network analysis. Aggregate data sources and techniques of analysis. Application of such concepts and methods to problems in social research.
In this course, we'll look at three of the most common forms of quantitative research: applied demographics, social network analysis, and survey research. Students will write a research report for each of the three techniques. In addition, we will do a lot of collaborative work, in class and on the course site.
We will be learning a software application for the data analysis tasks we will encounter. The software is an open source statistical programming language, R. It is free, and you can download a copy for your own computer if you wish. Installation instructions are provided on the R Project site. It is simple to install and set up on Windows, Linux, and Mac computers.
We will be working with quantitative data throughout the course, obviously, so we will be using quantitative reasoning skills all semester long. The mathematics we will encounter is nothing more complicated than algebra. We will not be doing calculations by hand — that is what the computer is for — so the emphasis is on understanding the application of the techniques rather than the math itself.
