Statistics and Research Methodology

Full course description

Students will learn the basic methodological and statistical skills to conduct empirical research. Furthermore, they will start thinking about a research question and a research design they want to employ for their research proposal.

Students will recapitulate and build on their knowledge of conducting experiments (discussing different designs, validity threats etc.), conducting survey research (including cross-sectional, longitudinal, multi-rater; discussing advantages and disadvantages), as well as combining field studies and experiments (combining different research designs), diary studies and experience sampling methods.

They will learn how to design questionnaires, codebooks, scale documentations, and how to administer surveys keeping track of response rate. They also learn how to get started with statistical analysis software (SPSS, Mplus), once data has been collected (data entry, recoding, computing scales, reliabilities, descriptive statistics, restructuring data for multilevel analyses). This course will also review basic regression analysis, ANOVA, MANOVA, factor analysis), and moderation/mediation.