Political Research Methods

Political Research Methods (311)

Textbook webpage: Salkind

Course Syllabus
PS 311 (Research Methods)

Instructor: Dr. Troy Gibson
Contact Information:

Office: LAB 418
Phone: 601-266-4277
E-mail: troy.gibson@usm.edu
Website: ocean.otr.usm.edu/~w302011
Text Website: http://www.sagepub.com/salkind4e

Course Description:
This course is designed to equip students with the basic skills necessary to conduct real research in Political Science. Students will be introduced to the basic components of research design and will be shown how to analyze data and test hypotheses using primarily quantitative, but also qualitative, techniques common in the social sciences.

Course Materials:

Statistics for People Who (Think They) Hate Statistics, 4rd edition. By Neil Salkind (Bundled with SPSS Student)

Course Requirements (10 point scale):
Midterm Exam – 25%
Final Exam – 25%
Daily Grades (homework assignments and attendance) – 15%
Annotated Bibliography* – 10%
Research Paper** – 25% (consult course website for details)

Course Outline (week of):
Jan.     18 - Class Organization and Chapter 1 (Intro: Political Science as Science)
Jan.     23 - Qualitative Methods (Ch 10: Handout) and Becoming familiar with SPSS (Appendix A)
Jan.     30 – No Class Monday (Labor Day); Chapter 6 (Hypotheses and Testing), Operationalization, and Chapter 16 (Reliability and Validity)
Feb.     6 – Chapter 2 (Means) and Chapter 3 (Variability)

– Chapter 4 (Graphing) and Literature Review (Ch 3: Baglione)
– Chapter 5 (Computing Correlation Coefficients); Discussion of Topics Wednesday + Annotated Bibliography Due

            27 - Chapter 7 (Probability: Fun with Z-Scores!!!)
March 5 – Midterm Exam
            12 – Chapter 8 (Significance Testing)
            19 – Chapter 9 (Means Testing: Different Groups)
            26 – Chapter 10 (Means testing: Related Groups)
April    2 - Chapter 11 (Analysis of Variance)
9 – Chapter 13 (Testing with Correlation Coefficients)
            16 – Chapter 14 (Linear Regression)
23 – Interpreting Multiple Regression Output; No Class Wednesday (Thanksgiving)
April    30 Continue (final papers due Friday)

Attendance:
I consider college students fully capable of making appropriate decisions with respect to class attendance and equally capable of living with the consequences of those decisions. Makeup exams will not be administered without acceptable documentation of a serious health problem requiring medical attention or excused school function (notify me well in advance). No makeup daily grades will be administered for any reason, as I will drop your lowest daily grade at the semester’s end.

Classroom Policies:

Turn cellular phones off.
Avoid anything that distracts classmates from full participation (tardiness, internet surfacing, etc.)
I strictly follow this institution’s standards with respect to academic dishonesty. Conviction will result in an automatic “F” in the course and may also involve an additional penalty from outside authorities. Consult your Student Handbook for details.

*You are expected to do an Annotated Bibliography. It will help you with your literature review for the research paper. Be sure to properly cite at least 5 references on the topic of your research paper (2 popular media or internet think-tank articles; 3 scholarly publications; two and no more than two articles may be internet citations).

Use the search engines EBSCOHOST and/or JSTOR for scholarly articles especially. For help with the content and proper citation in doing an Annotated Bibliography, consult:
http://www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/ref/research/skill28.htm
http://depts.washington.edu/pswrite/cite.html
http://lib.usm.edu/help/style_guides.html

**Research Paper: Select a topic to conduct actual research in Political Science. You need to identify a research question, conduct a literature review, present relevant theories, identify a research hypothesis, select and operationalize a dependent variable and at least two independent variables, identify data sources or locations for both, report and interpret univariate statistics for the dependent and main independent variable, explain what method or technique used for the analysis and why. Your paper should be double-spaced with proper citations and a reference page and 10-15 pages in length. The paper should have the following subsections: introduction; literature review; data, variables, and hypotheses section; methods and results section (provide justification for the technique you use), and a brief conclusion. For help: http://arches.uga.edu/~csallen/edicts.htm

Student Disability
If a student has a disability that qualifies under the Americans with
Disabilities Act and requires accommodations, he/she should contact
the Office for Disability Accommodations (ODA), for information on appropriate policies and procedures. Box 5128; voice telephone or TTY 214-3232.

My resources page
Think-Tanks