Social Scientific Methods

This main aim of this course is to give you an opportunity to think about social scientific methods from a cross-disciplinary point of view. It is therefore a research design course and not one that teaches specific methods. Instead of thinking of methodology as sets of standardised models, as methodology books often do, this course aims to help you reflect on the fundamental components of methodology: how social scientists discover important ideas and phenomena, how these are transformed into research questions, and the ways in which social scientific research is meaningful.