Ethical dilemmas and safety concerns can arise in any social science research, regardless of the topic or the researcher's career stage. This crash course equips doctoral students with tools and best practices to address ethical and safety issues at three key stages of the research lifecycle: before, during, and after fieldwork. The course emphasizes the researcher’s positionality as a central factor in designing, conducting, and promoting research, encouraging critical thinking throughout this entire process. Its goal is to help researchers uphold the highest standards of integrity and safety in their work. Participants are expected to develop a more reflexive understanding of their role in the field, as well as the ethical and safety challenges they may encounter both for themselves and for their research participants. This includes preparing risk assessments, negotiating access to where data should be collected, managing relationships with research participants or facilitators, ensuring proper data storage, and writing up and publishing their findings. The course supports participants in devising strategies to mitigate these challenges. By the end of the crash course, researchers will have completed their own risk assessments for their PhD projects and started to develop key ethical documents, including the information sheet and consent forms. This course is designed for students who are either in the pre-fieldwork phase or in the early stages of their fieldwork. However, students who have already completed their field research are also encouraged to participate and use the workshop as a reflective exercise.
Experimental research in political and social sciences
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are considered as the gold standard in the policy evaluation literature because they are a powerful tool to identify causal effect. The course supplies an introduction to the use of RCTs in the political and social sciences. The aim is to stress pros and cons of RCTs in order to develop doctoral candidates’ understanding of RCTs as well as to recognize how they can help to answer a wide range of research questions and to solve relevant social issues. The course will provide students with the competences to conduct and to critically discuss RCT and experimental research in the political and social sciences.
Getting published is notoriously hard. Although there are no rules of thumbs to construct a good research paper, the course deals with how to write articles for academic journals. The primary focus is on writing papers and responding to reviews. A secondary goal is to familiarize students with the requirements of journals as well as to provide them with first-hand experience with the publication process.
Seminar content:
Despite significant differences, good articles in any subfield of the social sciences (i.e., international relations theory, political science, political theory, and sociology) share a similar structure based on three main elements: an important research question, a sound research design, and a skilled execution consistent with the first two elements. The seminar will be organized in four two-hours meetings. In the first seminar, we will explore and delve into the three key aspects of a publishable paper. In the two following meetings we will examine and discuss several published articles in order to understand why and how they were published and, in some instances, why perhaps they did not deserve to be published but they were published anyway. In order to do so, students will prepare short evaluations of the assigned readings. Finally, in the last class students will present their own research structured around the three key requirements of a good research article.
The course aims to give a basic orientation in the epistemology of social science. The lectures will focus on epistemological issues and problems fundamental to social scientific explanation. We will address traditional questions of the scientific method about the kind of knowledge that social science should, or can, strive for. Then we will focus on the relationship between individual actors and larger social structures and the epistemological foundations of the rational choice approach that shaped social science research in recent decades.
A thorough knowledge of the literature and an in-depth understanding of classic works in the field of political and social science will be acquired. Analytical skills and the capacity to critically evaluate scholarly research will be developed. Originality in the application of knowledge will be encouraged, alongside a practical understanding of how research and enquiry contribute to the creation and interpretation of knowledge.
The course is an introduction to empirical political and social research methods and represents an opportunity for students to develop skills in basic data analysis, and interpretation and presentation of research findings, including standards for written research papers. The course will stress quantitative research designs and “how to do” empirical analysis. For this purpose, the course focuses on issues such as data collection, measurement issues, research design, and univariate and bivariate data analysis.
This course discusses the main features of designing qualitative research in the social and political sciences, presents some of the most common qualitative data gathering methods and introduces some key analytical strategies and approaches to make sense of qualitative data. Students are required to attend all course classes, study compulsory readings in advance and be ready to discuss them in class with the instructor. More specifically, two selected students will be required to deliver a 10-minutes comment on the assigned readings each day of class. Comments are not summaries of the assigned readings but rather a critical evaluation of the assigned readings’ main points. Thus, students might reflect on the assigned reading's weaknesses and strengths or discuss the readings referring to their research project.
These seminars provide an overview of the key approaches and issues in the substantive sub-fields of Comparative Politics. This introduction will outline the key sub-fields of Comparative Politics, cultivate individual academic-mindedness, and highlight promising research topics. We will engage seminal works as well as more recent research in order to familiarize ourselves with the origin and development of streams of research central to the field. This course is designed to be a foundational survey of the field and students will engage key dimensions of major sub-field literatures in discussion, interaction, and research.
Seminars in International Relations and Area Studies
The module explores several interconnected themes, beginning with the legacies of classical International Relations (IR) theory and their enduring relevance in contemporary analyses. By examining foundational theories, the module encourages students to consider how these theoretical frameworks continue to shape contemporary approaches to IR, while also prompting reflection on their evolving interpretations. A significant focus is placed on bridging the gap between IR theories and area studies, particularly in their application to the “non-Western” world. This involves assessing the adaptability of IR theories when applied to diverse global contexts, questioning whether these approaches can, or should, be reconciled with local knowledge and regional dynamics.
The purpose of the seminar is to explore and discuss some of the most influential and productive topics in sociological research. Based on the reading of founding texts of the discipline, participants are invited to debate the assumptions and implications of different directions of research, particularly from the point of view of their relevance to contemporary work. By the end of the course, participants will have acquired an advanced familiarity with the central concepts and perspectives of the discipline, to which they will be able to refer competently in the development of their work.
This seminar course is designed to introduce doctoral students to the literature on public policy and to develop their ability to think critically about policy-making in different political and social contexts. The course focuses largely on theories and conceptualisations related to understanding and explaining policy dynamics. Doctoral students should consider this course as a stepping stone to mastering a broad knowledge of the key concepts of how policy dynamics (and even their policy trade-offs) evolve over time. Actors and agency, change and stability, institutions and ideas are the central concepts of the main theories of policy dynamics, although they are mixed and arranged in different ways according to the research questions the theories seek to answer. Thus, by focusing on the drivers and components of policy dynamics, the course also sheds light on the political and social drivers of the processes through which collectivized decisions are made and implemented, at different institutional and governance levels, and their socio-political effects. The course will serve as a foundation for the students’ research not only in public policy, but also in sister disciplines like sociology and international relations.