This Summer School offers four courses.
On a daily basis, each participant should follow the basic morning course (09.30 – 13.00) Research Methods in Social Sciences and could choose among three (3) options for the evening session (14.00 – 16.00).
Courses outline
Core course
Research Methods in Social Sciences: Combining Historical with Quantitative approaches.
Elias Dinas (University of Oxford & EUI) & Vicky Fouka (Stanford University)
The course is designed to help you understand and apply statistical tools to answer causal questions in social science research. Causal questions concern the impact of a potential cause (i.e. a policy intervention, a change in economic conditions, a historical event) on some outcome (i.e. vote choice, conflict, levels of development). We will start by presenting the most widespread statistical approach for examining cause and effect: the potential outcomes framework and counterfactual analysis. We will then revisit linear regression, the main tool used for statistical analysis in the social sciences, and the basis for applying other statistical methods of causal inference. We will examine different design-based methods to unpack causality, including experiments, difference in differences, instrumental variables and regression discontinuity designs. Throughout the course, we will use research from political science, economics and history to motivate and fix ideas.
Elective courses
Geographic Information Systems
Elias Dinas (University of Oxford & EUI) & Vicky Fouka (Stanford University)
Taking this course will allow you to display the geographic distribution of any variable of interest. For example, you will be able to visualise the level of inequality in each country all over the world or the proportion of asylum seekers residing in each EU member-state. This is an applied course: we will be using QGIS, a leading open source geographic information system. We will start with the user-interface platform and then move to R to see how we can use QGIS within R to draw any map we want exactly as we want it.
Web-scraping
How can we retrieve all news articles related to the Olympic Games from a specific website? Could we access all opinion polls referring to the US elections of 1994? Are we able to retrieve all yesterday’s tweets with the hashtag (#) elections? In this course we will learn how to obtain data using tools for the web. We will introduce you to web scraping, to the tools that we use to implement it and the challenges we need to know. Also, we will demonstrate a basic web scraping tool and we’ll have the opportunity for discussion on specific projects. Students need to have basic knowledge of the World wide web, basic programming experience could be helpful but is not essential.
Questionnaire design
Jordan and Jacob are young priests and they are wondering if they could smoke and pray on the same time. “We should ask the bishop”, Jordan suggested.
“Bishop, may I smoke while I’m praying”, Jordan asked the Bishop. “No, way”, Bishop responded. When Jordan met Jack again he told him that he received a negative reply. “That’s bizarre. Bishop told me that it is completely ok”, Jacob said. “What did you ask him?”, Jordan wanted to know. And Jack replied; “I asked him If it is ok to pray, while I’m smoking”.
Bishop gave a different reply on the same question, slightly changed though, regarding the same issue. Is that possible? Of course it is and this what this course is about. It is about questionnaire design.
On this course, we will go through from the fundamentals of the questionnaire design to the assessment of the common errors and practical examples. This course has two parts; the first one will be focused on the basics of the questionnaire design and the second one will elaborate more on the practical implications and case studies. Participants could select either Part A or Part B or both. No prior knowledge is required.