SOC 6130 - Logics and Methods of Sociological Research

Fall. 3 credits. Letter grades only.

Open to: new graduate students in sociology.

J. Budnick.

This course will expose students to ethnography, experiments, small-N comparison, content analysis, archival research, internet data scraping, data visualization, network and sequence approaches, and more. We will begin to answer the following core questions: What are the strengths of different methods? What are their weaknesses? What assumptions about research design issues are built into each method? What assumptions about the scientific status of sociology are built into each method? How can different methods be combined so that their strengths and weaknesses balance one another?