Research Design Course

 

Meeting 4

Schedule for today

  • Two brief presentations
  • Discussion in small groups
    • 20 minutes per session
    • Match with different participants in each session
  • Roundtable discussion

Poster session

  • Set-up
    • 3 min pitch of your RD
    • Poster/Slide on the screen
    • 3 min for Q&A
    • open discussion
    • evaluation
  • January 26th (Monday)
  • Upload your poster
  • Lunch @Cafe 404

What to study

  • Random selection
    • The law of large numbers
  • Case selection: typical, diverse, extreme, deviant, influential, most-similar and most-different
  • Variation in the outcome & predictor(s)
  • Role of manipulation

Example

  • Systemic Vulnerability and the Origins of Developmental States: Northeast and Southeast Asia in Comparative Perspective (2005) Doner, Ritchie and Slater, IO.
  • Why a particular institutional setting – the developmental state – emerges?

Example

Example

What to worry about

  • Measurement error
  • Confounding
  • Omitted variable bias
  • Reverse causation
  • Non-random selection (cherry-picking)

Summary

  • Research question
  • Proposition
  • Operationalisation
  • Case selection
     
  • 4-6 pages research design section of your thesis