Undergraduate Program Status
This course is designed to assist researchers in combining two or more methodological approaches in empirical projects—so-called mixed methods research (MMR)—in order to strengthen the validity of their conclusions and demonstrate generalizability of their findings. Particular attention will be paid to the extent to which methods from diverging epistemologies can be combined, and if so how. The course is heavily weighted toward examples, class exercises and workshopping student assignments, with extensive instructor feedback on multiple written assignments. Finally, we discuss techniques for integrating the empirical results and writing them up in a convincing narrative style.
At the end of this course, students are able to fit an appropriately tailored mixed-method study design to their research question, establish a plan to assess their empirical claims using a combination of research methods, and work out how to approach, collect and analyze different types of empirical data at multiple levels of analysis and across different spatial and temporal domains.
Based on four assignments given out during the course.