Empirical Research Methods for Political Science

This class is a doctoral-level introduction to research design and statistical methods for empirical analysis in social science. The class introduces the chief goals of statistical analysis and the causal inference framework, focusing on the importance of specificity in estimands and the properties of statistical estimators, the potential outcomes framework, the definition of causal effects, the mechanics of randomized controlled trials, and prominent research designs for causal inference with observational data. The class has no mathematical prerequisites. Students will learn the statistical software R.