NORED920 - Introduction to research methods and statistics
An introductory course in quantitative research for PhD students
Main content
The main course goal is to introduce Ph.D. students to quantitative research methods and statistics.
More specifically, the Ph.D. students will develop their understanding of different research designs that are used in social science. Likewise, the Ph.D. students will develop their comprehension of how to develop questionnaires and what statistical tools they can use to validate them. The students will also be introduced to the theoretical foundations of descriptive and inferential statistics and learn how to apply a selection of analyses independently. Finally, students will be introduced to the statistical program SPSS and learn how to use this for basic data processing, data quality checking and data analysis.
After completing the course, the Ph.D. students will have general knowledge about:
- The most commonly used quantitative research designs in social sciences
- How to develop a questionnaire and be familiar with the process of questionnaire validation
- The most commonly used statistical analyses and their theoretical background
- How to use SPSS for basic data processing, data quality checking and data analysis
After completing the course, the Ph.D. student will have specific knowledge about:
- Cross-sectional, longitudinal, and experimental designs and the strengths and limitations of these approaches
- How to formulate questions and response categories
- Different forms of questionnaire reliability and validity and how to test this
- The fundamentals hypothesis testing and be familiar with associated terms
- Descriptive statistics (central tendency and dispersion measures)
- Inferential statistics (t-test, chi-square, linear regression)
- Applying the above in SPSS
