- Design and Data Analysis for Social Impact

Catalog description

There are so many areas of political life that are governed by intuition and conventional wisdom. But is the conventional wisdom true? In order to confidently make progress solving social problems we need to know how people work and whether interventions have the intended impacts. The course has three goals. While reading research on a wide range of interesting questions about our political world, we will continually discuss problems of causal inference – the degree to which we have confidence that x causes y. We’ll learn about various approaches to causal research, covering a range of research designs in the social sciences. And, third, we’ll practice analyzing data from these research designs using modeling techniques appropriate for each. You will leave this course with the training needed to critique research but also to conduct your own research, offering appropriate caveats about how much we can confidently know.