Curtis L. Frazier

PGH 371

Office Hours M-W 11-12

743,3936 (office)

This is a course about social research: what it is, how to do it and how to interpret its findings. In this course, you will learn some of the research methods that are used in the social sciences. While we will be dealing with statistics a great deal, this is not a statistics course. This course will focus on how to obtain, evaluate and interpret statistics as well as prepare and implement a research project.

We will be spending about 1/2 of the class time in the Social Science Data Lab working on your projects. The lab is available to students from M-F 10-5. If a number of you wish to have the lab open late one or two nights a week or on Saturday, let me know and we can work something out.

REQUIRED TEXTS:

Jaeger, Richard - Statistics: A Spectator Sport

Sirkin, R. Mark - Statistics for the Social Sciences

There is a great deal of reading associated with the first part of this course - probably too much. While you should read all of the material carefully, this class is predicated on the idea that students learn best by doing, rather than reading, about statistics. I am primarily interested that you understand the key points of the readings. Although it is important to understand many of the formulas in your reading, do not become overwrought if they do not make sense to you. Generally, I will explain the formulas for which you are responsible.

GRADES & POLICIES:

This course involves one long research project. This project will be broken up into a series of short weekly papers. Each paper will build upon the previous until the last week, when you have a completed report. Research methods are useless if you cannot express coherently what you have learned. Therefore, your project will be graded not only on content, but on grammar as well. This is not an English course, but misspellings and sentence fragments are unacceptable on a college research report. You will be required to present your paper to the class at the end of the semester. This is a very informal presentation, so it is nothing about which to worry or get nervous.

There will be a number of pop quizzes. The pop quizzes will count for a total of 10% of your final grade.

Class participation will also count towards your final grade. You are expected to participate in all class discussions. That means you must be prepared. A large part of the class involves students teaching each other through questions and discussion.

If at any point in the semester you feel that you are falling behind or having problems which are affecting your performance, do not hesitate to come see me. On the other hand, do not wait until the last day of class to give me a sob story about how you must get a B or you won't graduate. If you come to me early enough, I am willing to offer substantial time outside our scheduled class time to help students understand the concepts in the course.

Cheating on assignments or quizzes will be dealt with harshly. Cooperation between students is encouraged, but cheating is strictly prohibited.

Grading
Pop Quizzes	10%
Participation	10%
Weekly papers	10% x 4 = 40%
Final Paper	30%
Presentation	10%
	100%

Over the course of this semester, you will be preparing a single term paper. You will be turning in one piece of the term paper at times listed on the syllabus. The papers are due on Mondays. However, if you turn in your paper by the end of the day of the previous Friday (5:00), I will be able to quickly return them to you with comments, suggestions, and questions. Each week of the course, you will learn new skills for studying your research question.

Each student will select from the series of variables listed in the box below. You will select one variable from each section to study in detail. Some students may wish to select a larger number of variables to study. However, you should be aware that additional variables, while leading to a more interesting result, also leads to a more complex result. (You will be looking at almost all of these variables at one time or another.) The variables in section 1 are already created for you and need very little if any work to use. The variables in section 2 will take some work and creativity to create. You should try to pick variables which you think go together in some way (for example, income and taxes or education and racism). No two students should pick exactly the same set of variables.

All of your papers will deal, to some extent, with the over-riding theme of vote choice. That is, why do people vote the way that they do? However, this question can be approached in a variety of ways. Your papers will differ based upon the variables you choose from sections 1 and 2.

Final papers will be due during the final exam period - Friday Aug 8^th from 2-5.

Section 1 Gender Race Attention to campaign Ideology Immigration Trust Education Age Marital status Income Abortion Section 2 Attention to media Economy Integrity of candidates Welfare programs Environment Religion Racism Taxes Section 3 Vote choice Party ID

Readings
Date	Readings
Tuesday July 8th	Sirkin, Chapter 1
Wednesday July 9th	Sirkin, Chapters 2 & 3; Jaeger Chapter 5
Thursday July 10th	Jaeger, Chapter 7 & 8
Monday July 14th	Handout	PAPER
Tuesday July 15th	Sirkin, Chapter 4, Jaeger Chapter 2
Wednesday July 16th	Sirkin, Chapter 5, Jaeger Chapter 3
Thursday July 17th	Catch up
Monday July 21st	Handout	PAPER
Tuesday July 22nd	Sirkin, Chapter 6
Wednesday July 23rd	Sirkin, Chapter 7 & 11
Thursday July 24th	Catch up
Monday July 28th	Sirkin, Chapter 10, Jaeger Chapter 13	PAPER
Tuesday July 29th	Jaeger Chapter 4
Wednesday July 30th	Jaeger Chapter 15
Thursday July 31st	Handout
Monday August 4th	Catch up	PAPER
Tuesday August 5th	Catch up
Wednesday August 6th	Catch up
Thursday August 7th	Presentations

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday
	Introduction	The Scientific Method - Literature Review	Introduction to Data -Data Collection	Inference
	Creating a Dataset/ Using SPSS	Descriptive Statistics	Variability	Lab Work
	Working with Data	Crosstabs	Significance	Lab Work
	ANOVA	Correlation	Regression	Causal Modeling
	Review/Work Day	Review/Work Day	Review/Work Day	Presentations