Research Methods in Economics and Social Science

Overview

The aim of this module is to give an introduction into the statistical methods of the social and economic sciences, with special emphasis on the research process and data collection methods.

By the end of this module, a student should understand

• what social science is and how it is done,
• what the relationship between theory and data is and which role modeling has,
• which types of data are available to the social scientist and
• which methods are used to collect and analyse these data.

Syllabus

1. Introduction: Data, Levels of Measurement, Types of Variables
2. Univariate Statistics
3. Bivariate Statistics, Nominal Data
4. Bivariate Statistics, Ordinal Data
5. Bivariate Statistics, Metric Data
6. Multiple Regression
7. Factor Analysis
8. Cluster Analysis
9. Discriminant Analysis
10. Summary

Course material

All slides for this course can be found here.

Most of the contents of this course is also dealt with in Andreas Engel, Michael Möhring, Klaus G. Troitzsch: Sozialwissenschaftliche Datenanalyse. Mannheim: BI Wissenschaftverlag 1995.

Basic Reading

• Keith F. Punch (1998). Introduction to Social Research. Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches. London: Sage
• Jane Fielding and Nigel Gilbert (2000): Understanding Social Statistics. London: Sage