Is the mass media really biased? Does abortion lower the crime rate? Does the "No Child Left Behind" Act encourage cheating? Providing convincing answers to these hot-button political issues requires good research design. In this class, we learn the techniques behind designing research studies that allow political scientists and economists to answer exactly these kinds of questions. While PSC 200 or 201 is strongly recommended, this is not a course in data analysis or statistics. Rather, we focus on setting up problems so that data analytic techniques, when applied, provide the correct answers. We will draw examples from throughout political science as well as from Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner.

Is the mass media really biased? Does abortion lower the crime rate? Does the "No Child Left Behind" Act encourage cheating? Providing convincing answers to these hot-button political issues requires good research design. In this class, we learn the techniques behind designing research studies that allow political scientists and economists to answer exactly these kinds of questions. While PSC 200 or 201 is strongly recommended, this is not a course in data analysis or statistics. Rather, we focus on setting up problems so that data analytic techniques, when applied, provide the correct answers. We will draw examples from throughout political science as well as from Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner.