Research Designs

Short Bio Samo Kropivnik has gained his Ph.D. in the field of political science at University of Ljubljana (UL) in 1997. Currently he is Associate Professor of Social Sciences Methodology at Faculty of Social Sciences (UL) and Senior Researcher at Institute of Social Sciences (UL FSS), teaching various courses on marketing research and political science methodology and contributing to research projects on political participation and marketing communications by dealing pragmatically with research approaches and designs, with exploratory and descriptive research methods and techniques in general and in particular with multivariate methods such as clustering, factor analysis and regression. Prerequisite knowledge Note from the Academic Convenors to prospective participants: by registering to this course, you certify that you possess the prerequisite knowledge that is requested to be able to follow this course. The instructor will not teach again these prerequisite items. If you doubt whether you possess that knowledge to a sufficient extent, we suggest you contact the instructor before you proceed to your registration. Some experiences with commonly referenced research designs and their building blocks are appreciated. The more students know about applicability of various methods and techniques the more they can gain from the course. Short course outline In an applied manner, the course addresses the question “How to design a research in the non-paradigmatic social sciences?”. The logic and principles behind the crucial tasks that have to be performed when conducting a research, from problem definition and recognition of different research strategies (approaches) to harmonised selection of data collection, analysis and interpretations methods, will be presented during the lectures to enable future research planning in a form of a research design. During the seminar part students are expected to prepare and discuss the backbone of a research design: a made-up case, approached with different strategies, recognized as being predominately qualitative and predominately quantitative.
In the introductory part of the course, factors that decisively shape major characteristics of the intended research are introduced and discussed to deal with highly abstract and idealised concept of various predetermined types of research designs, without discriminating any of them in favour of the other. In the main part, research-design-relevant characteristics of different (sometimes conflicting) methods and techniques that can typically be applied in various steps of a research process are presented, discussed and illustrated with examples from diverse fields of social sciences.