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9SYLLABUS FOR POLITICAL SCIENCE 331-01 SEMINAR IN POLITICAL THEORY AND METHODOLOGY SPRING 2002 Dr. Jon S. Ebeling Office: Butte 720 Phone: 898-4512 Class meeting times Thursday 7-10 PM in Butte 207 Office Hours: Wednesday 1-3;Tues. 2-3:30; Thurs. 2-3:30. This is a seminar for graduate students interested in the practice of and problems in conducting research in political behavior, policy analysis and evaluation for the academic disciplines of public administration and politics. It is expected that both the instructor and the students will gain new knowledge from working together in this course. The course will feature formation of hypotheses, and data processing to test the hypotheses using actual data. It does have a policy research and formation orientation using quantitative methods. In that regard, the course assumes you have no knowledge of statistics, or you have had a course so long ago that you don’t recall the details of it. The course is designed to cover an introduction to statistics for graduate students and to cover the application of computer software to the solution of some analytical problems at the same time. Students are expected to develop rigorous research papers, high quality writing and to use theory and operational definitions of theoretical constructs to test hypotheses with the statistics covered in this course. There are two objectives in this course. The first is to give a consumer’s knowledge of statistics and the reasoning behind the use of it. The second objective is to give you the skills and experience with simple statistical methods and report preparation software to do analysis of small data sets obtained over the internet on personal computers or in limited cases data that you have. Your grade in the course is based on your abilities to show me you have accomplished these two objectives. You can show me your accomplishments in the homework and the reports you prepare for the course. The course activities will consist of homework using problems in the software package called STATA, and homework from the text by Williams. I will also require written interpretations of statistical tests that you perform, and the application of statistical tests and the use of computer output in writing short, highly focused analyses from data sets supplied by me and Lawrence Hamilton and in some cases your own. The latter, however, is not encouraged. You will be expected to learn the following computer software: STATA and Micro-soft Word for windows, or its equivalent. The network system in the lab has professional versions of both STATA and MSWord. Using these software packages you will do the homework assignments and the reports in the course. You should get some DOS formatted disks in size 1.4 megabytes for this class. You will be given the opportunity to download data from an internet site, and to copy data bases of use in this class. There is a full version of STATA available for your own use if there are at least ten students who whish to purchase that software. The price per person is a student price. Activities in the course that you will be expected to complete on time include: assigned homework, data processing and statistical analyses, reading literature and writing about social science issues using computerized data and statistical methods. I will provide procedural overviews of statistical computations, computer operations, statistical reasoning, and the applications of these concepts to the policy research process. You will be expected to do the work I assign as noted on a tri-weekly basis. You will obtain accounts on an internet server which contains an archive of data bases in SPSS format. Those data will be converted to use in STATA using STATransfer. I must make sure you have an email account that I can send messages to. I’ve found that students often can improve their work by contacting me over the internet. I hope to use that device to provide email feedback and discussions.10The course is extensive in that there is a lot to cover in a short period of time. It is my hope, however, that you will learn the material and apply it in your work in class, on your thesis, other courses, or in other research activities you might have outside the University. As you can see the course is designed to give you some real world experiences with the use of quantitative data analysis and report preparation. In all your work you will be evaluated according to graduate student standards. That means your writing is expected to be clear and understandable, and the format of your homework must be clear and easily understood by me. If you are absent from class without a formal, written excuse from a physician or similar person of authority, you will be penalized in your final grade. It is very important that you ask me questions about procedures so that other students can learn from your questions. Your final grade will be a function of my judgements of your work and the efforts you put into this class. I try as hard as I can to get everybody through this class. As the leader of the course, I reserve the right to alter the focus, the activities, and the measurement of performance during the semester with due notice to the students at any time in the semester. This decision, if it occurs, will be made on my perception of the rate at which we progress through the topics of the course. The topics of the course will have specified homework assignments that must be completed on a computer and they will include the use of STATA and Word software. Here are the texts for the course: A. Lawrence C. Hamilton, Statistics with Stata 5, (Pacific Grove, California: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, 1998). Hereafter Hamilton. Required B. Richard L. Cole, Introduction to Political Science and Policy Research, (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), Required. Frederick Williams, Reasoning with Statistics, How to Read Quantitative Research, Fourth Edition, (New York, N.Y.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1992). Required. C. Diana Hacker, A Pocket Style Manual, (Boston, Mass: Bedford Books 1997) latest Edition. Required. Zealure H. Holcomb, Interpreting Basic Statistics, (Los Angeles, CA :Pyrczak Publishing, 2001), 3rd edition. Notice these optional texts. I am recommending them to you if you are having difficulty reasoning and calculating with statistics. Ronald E. Shiffler and Arhtur J. Adams, Just The Basics, Please, a Quck


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Chico POLS 331 - Syllabus

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