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Level
Level: IntroductoryLeads on to
Member rate £572.50
Non-Member rate £1,145.00
Early bird discount available until 14 December 2026.
Save £45.00 Loyalty discount applied automatically*
Save 5% on each additional course booked
* If you attended a qualifying previous Methods School in 2026, you qualify for £45.00 off your course fee.
Date: Monday 22 – Friday 26 February 2027
Time: 13:30 – 16:30 CET
This interactive course uses advanced pedagogical tools and is designed for master's-level students and above. It runs as three-hour live sessions on Zoom over five days, with course materials and pre-course readings available on our Learning Management System at least two weeks before the start. Office hours are also available for one-to-one consultations on your own project.
The course is limited to 18 participants, ensuring that the teaching team can address the individual needs of each participant.
Research design is about responsibility, choice and trade-offs. This course will help you develop the tacit skills, as well as the formal skills and knowledge, that you need to plan and carry out a doctoral research project.
You will begin by developing a research question, or set of questions, that is researchable in practice. Good research rests on an open system of thought, which requires continual testing, review and criticism of others’ ideas, and a willingness to explore new ones.
The course will also encourage you to practise research in motion. Nobody, it has been said, trips over anything while sitting down: the greater your curiosity, resilience and persistence as a researcher, the more likely you are to find something of significance.
The aim of the course is to give you a toolkit to help you develop as a scholar. By the end of the course, you will be able to:
The course takes a hands-on, practical approach, applying active learning, problem-solving and decision-making to your own research. Some class time will be devoted to lectures, but many sessions will also involve group work, class-wide or small-group discussions, and hands-on activities.
3 ECTS credits awarded for engaging fully in class activities.
1 additional ECTS credit awarded for completing a post-course assignment.
Anne-Marie Jeannet is Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Milan, and Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant project ‘Deindustrializing Societies and the Political Consequences’ (DESPO).
Her methodological experience spans experimental and quasi-experimental methods, observational studies and machine learning, as well as qualitative work including secondary analysis of oral histories and focus group data.
She teaches Research Design to Master’s and doctoral students.
To thrive in research, whether in a doctoral dissertation or an independent research project, you should complete all the exercises and apply what you have learned. This means going beyond simply reading the assignments and taking part in class discussions. Much of the knowledge developed through this course is tacit: it cannot be fully articulated. In other words, you can learn how to do social and political research only by doing it, not by reading, listening or discussing.
A brief caveat: this is neither an applied statistics course nor a methods course. It is not intended to replace the specialised methodological training that successful dissertations typically demand.
Imagining, questioning and problematising. In-class group exercise.
Output: a refined research question.
Sourcing, theorising, conceptualising and hypothesising. In-class group exercise.
Output: a hypothesis and a causal diagram or directed acyclic diagram (DAG).
Selecting, sampling, operationalising and planning. In-class group exercise.
Output: a Gantt chart of your planned research activities.
Counting, observing and asking. In-class group exercise.
Output: a SWOT analysis comparing possible research methods.
Inferring and claiming. In-class group exercise.
Output: a short statement outlining the claims your research could support.
Write a description of your research project. The aim of this assignment is to begin framing, motivating and justifying the choices you will make in your research design. You are encouraged, but not required, to incorporate the feedback you received from the instructor and your peers to improve and refine your project.
The assignment should be 3–5 pages long (single-spaced, standard margins, 10-point font). You are encouraged to prepare it using a typesetting program (e.g. LaTeX), but you may use a word processor (e.g. Microsoft Word).
Please include the following sections:
State the main argument of your thesis in one or two sentences and visualise it in a simple diagram. Please create the diagram digitally, not by hand. Then state one to three testable hypotheses for your analysis.
If you are using an inductive approach, do not state hypotheses. Instead, explain your reasoning for choosing an inductive approach and how your work will benefit from this choice.
You should have a basic knowledge of statistics and regression analysis.
You will get more out of the course if you already have an idea or topic for your research project.
The course includes three hours of live teaching each day for five days, alongside readings and other learning activities.
Once you have registered and paid, you will receive access to our Learning Management System (LMS) approximately two weeks before the course start date. Course materials, including pre-course readings, will be available here. Allow approximately 20 hours per week before the course to review the materials and complete readings and any pre-course tasks.
During the course week, you should allow approximately two to three hours per day for preparation and assignments, in addition to the live teaching sessions.
The course offers the opportunity to earn three ECTS credits. To earn a fourth credit, you will need to complete a post-course assignment involving approximately 25 hours of work.
This course description may be subject to subsequent adaptations (e.g. taking into account new developments in the field, participant demands, group size, etc.). Registered participants will be informed at the time of change.
By registering for this course, you confirm that you possess the knowledge required to follow it. The instructor will not teach prerequisite items. If in doubt, please contact us before registering.