Bachelor
2024/2025
Research Seminar: Research Design
Type:
Compulsory course (Political Science and World Politics)
Area of studies:
Political Science
When:
3 year, 1 module
Mode of studies:
offline
Open to:
students of one campus
Instructors:
Yury Kabanov
Language:
English
ECTS credits:
1
Course Syllabus
Abstract
The main goal of the discipline is to help students to prepare and write their course works and graduation theses. The 'Research Seminar' covers a range of basic topics, such as composing a research design, formulating a research problem and research question, searching for literature, reviewing, and planning research strategies. Moreover, the course helps to deal with not only term papers but academic articles and analytical reports too.
Learning Objectives
- The goal of the discipline is to help students to prepare and write their course works.
- Composing a research design.
- Dealing with literature and other sources.
- Acquiring basic skills of academic writing.
- Getting familiar with basic research methods.
Expected Learning Outcomes
- Enumerates the basic structural units of and formal requirements for the term paper and formal requirements for it.
- Knows what plagiarism is and how to avoid it
- Formulates research questions
- Finds information and literature on the subject matter of the course work
- Conducts a literature review
- Knows different types of research designs and research strategies
- Chooses the research design adequate for the solution of the research problem
- Describes the main elements of the research design in Political Science
- Compares the main types of the research design
- Applies correct techniques of conceptualization, operationalization and measurement, given the research context.
- Describes and formulates research design based on the given research goal and context
Course Contents
- (1) Research Design in Political Science: The Basics
- (2) Concepts in Research Design
- (3) Comparative Research Design
- (4) Case-Study
- (5) Set-Theoretic Methods of Research
Assessment Elements
- Research ProposalIn the research proposal, students should briefly reflect on the design of their provision research paper (term paper). The topic may differ from the title of their term paper, however, in this case the assignment will be less useful for their term papers. In the research proposal, students need to describe the following elements: (1) The title of the research paper and the research question: (2) Concepts to be used in the study, how they might be conceptualized, operationalized and measured (3) Research design selection and its justification (e.g., qualitative vs. quantiative, case study vs. large-N etc.) (4) Possible challenges that may occur due to the selected research desgin (5) Provisional empirical research strategy: what data are requried, what methods of data collection and analysis are to be used (6) Possible challenges that may occur in the empirical analysis (7) Anticipated results / Conclusion: how can the selected research design help to answer the research question Overall, the research proposal should briefly and clearly explain the provisional design of the research paper: what is to be studied and how. Students need to demonstrate their knowledge of the course to successfully complete this task. Technical requirements: (1) The volume of the proposal should within 8-10 thousand characters (including spaces). (2) The proposal is to be submitted in PDF format, the name file should be the surname and name of the student. (3) Sources of information must be correctly cited. The references and footnotes are not included into the volume of the paper. A student may use any citation style. (4) The use of any AI-supported tools is strictly prohibited, including their use in text translation, checking grammar and spelling, etc. The use of any AI tools will result in a grade of 0.
- Seminar ActivitiesAt the end of each seminar, students are to do written assignments, designed to check their progress. The assignment is to be completed within 15-20 minutes. Some assignments might be organized as teamwork. In order to successfully solve the task, students should read the required literature and actively participate in the class.
- ExamThe exam lasts for 60 minutes, conducted in a written form.
