Research Practicum 3

Course goals

The aim of Research Practicum 3 is to integrate what students have learned in the course ‘An institutional rights perspective on immigrant inclusion’ (MERM 9), the methods courses and the research practicums 1 and 2 in MERM with new knowledge and skills concerning measurement operationalization, questionnaire design and programming, and data collection procedures. In the first two weeks of the course, students will learn and practice new skills in formulating survey questions, designing a questionnaire, and collecting survey data. After these two weeks, students will hand in the methods section of a research paper in which they explain sampling, operationalization, and planned analyses. The final two weeks provide students with the opportunity to practice data analysis and writing the results and discussion section of a research paper.

 

Content

In the first two weeks, students will work in groups to develop a survey questionnaire that allows testing their hypotheses. Students will operationalize their constructs, present their model and the operationalization in class, design and program an online survey. The first two parts of the final grade are based on the presentation of the operationalization and on the methods section. The assessment of presentations will be based on the clarity and preparation of the presentation as well as the constructive feedback students provide to their fellow students. The methods section will be graded based on the clarity, accuracy, and completeness of the provided information. This includes the quality of the operationalization of the constructs as survey questions.

In the last two weeks of the course, students will individually analyze their data and report the results in a brief research report. In this course, students will thus learn new skills of operationalization and data collection, and they will deepen their understanding of the use of statistics and the theories discussed in MERM 9. The assessment of the final paper will be based on the way students translate theoretical ideas into empirical research, in particular, the way in which they conduct and present their empirical analyses and connect them to theoretical ideas in the introduction and discussion sections of their paper.