Research Practicum 1

Course goals

The aims of the course are to integrate theories with statistical methods and to write a coherent research paper within a short time span. Students also learn to reflect critically on each other’s work and to present their research in class.

Relation between tests and learning goals:
There are in total 3 assignments (30%), class participation (10%), and final paper (60%). Assignment 1 (theoretical introduction) tests the knowledge of theories and formulation of hypotheses. Assignment 2 (method) tests the preparation and cleaning of the data, recoding of the variables, and creation of scales. Assignment 3 (results) evaluates the application of quantitative methods of analysis (in SPSS) to test the hypotheses. The final paper evaluates the ability to integrate the products of the first 3 assignments and write a coherent, accessible and professional paper that has the format of a journal article and that ends with a clear conclusion. In addition, students get graded for class participation, which includes presentations of their paper and oral and written feedback on the work of their classmates.

Content

In this course, students integrate the theories of MERM1 and MERM2 with the methods and statistics of MERM3.This will be done by writing a theory-driven empirical paper that focuses on a topic discussed in MERM1 or MERM2. In the first week of the course, groups of two students choose a specific research question, and they get an introduction to the data set. Students start reading the literature and they write a theoretical introduction. In the second week they develop further their theory and hypothesis section, and make a start with their empirical analysis. In week 3, students elaborate on their empirical analysis, testing their hypotheses. Finally, in week 4, the results, conclusions and discussion of the paper have to be completed. Detailed instructions on the paper and the course proceedings will be given at the beginning of the course.