Undergraduate Course: Introduction to Political Data Analysis (PLIT08009)
Course Outline
| School | School of Social and Political Science |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 8 (Year 2 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This Year 2 course will introduce students to political data analysis using domestic and international data. The course will cover core substantive topics in Politics and international relations, typically exploring one major research question from Politics and one major research question from IR. It will explore how to access relevant data and assess the appropriateness of data. It will provide key skills in quantitative data analysis, including descriptive statistics, cross-tab/contingency tables, measures of association, correlation and regression. These techniques will be used to answer different aspects of the same research question. The course will show how using different types of data and different techniques provide different ways to answer the types of questions typically posed by empirical Politics and IR scholars. Throughout, both the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches will be addressed, as will issues such as validity, reliability and missing data. Lectures will be accompanied by weekly tutorials delivered in a computer lab. |
| Course description |
Week 1:
Lecture: Understanding data and data quality: Types of data, assessment data quality (validity and reliability), operationalisation, levels of measurement.
Tutorial: Practice finding data
Week: 2:
Research Question: How do we define and measure democracy?
Lecture: Exploratory Data Analysis and Data Visualisation I: Computing descriptive statistics (max, min, mean, median, range, standard deviation), histograms
Tutorial: Introduction to SPSS, computing summary statistics and plotting histograms using SPSS
Week 3:
Research Question: Are people living in more democratic countries happier?
Lecture: Exploratory Data Analysis and Data Visualisation II: Boxplots, bar-charts, scatterplot, matrix scatterplot
Tutorial: Applications using the SPSS chart builder
Week 4:
Lecture: The Logic of statistical inference: Populations and samples, types of hypotheses, type I and type II errors, central limit theorem, law of large numbers
Tutorial: Data management, including recoding variables and computing new variables
Week 5:
Research Question: Does democracy cause peace?
Lecture: Comparing two means: T-tests and ANOVA
Tutorial: Running t-tests and ANOVA in SPSS and interpretation of the results.
Week 6: Innovative Learning Week
Week 7:
Research Question: What are the determinants of voter turnout?
Lecture: Measures of association for ordinal and nominal data: Chi square and various PRE measures
Tutorial: Chi-square tests in SPSS
Week 8:
Research Question: What determines the popularity of government and their leaders?
Lecture: Correlation and bivariate regression
Tutorial: Correlation and bivariate regression in SPSS
Week 9
Research Question: Do attitudes to risk affect referendum preferences for constitutional change?
Lecture: Multivariate regression
Tutorial: Multivariate regression in SPSS
Week 10:
Research Question: Which theory of voting explains individual vote choice?
Lecture: Logistic regression
Tutorial: Logistic regression in SPSS
Week 11:
Lecture: Extensions of tests learned, preparation for timed assignment
Tutorial: preparation for timed assignment
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
|
Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2016/17, Available to all students (SV1)
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Quota: 180 |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 10,
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 9,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
177 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
|
| Additional Information (Assessment) |
A mix of
-One short assignment (15%)
-Essay involving application of data analysis (45%)
-Timed assignment (40%)
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| Feedback |
Assignment 1 is designed in part to evaluate whether students can find data and summarise it visually but it is also intended as a stepping stone to the research paper. The feedback they receive in this assignment will help them develop their essay. They will also receive feedback for their essay prior to the timed assignment. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- formulate a research question and hypotheses, identify relevant concepts and variables
- access, and assess the quality of, data typically used in Politics and International Relations
- apply essential quantitative data analysis skills linked to core topics of Politics and IR
- discuss the results of their data analysis as well as present quantitative findings in text, tables and graphs or charts
- analyse data using NESSTAR, as well as input and analyse data using SPSS
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Reading List
Philip H. Pollock (2012) The Essentials of Political Analysis, 4th ed
James M. Carlson and Mark S. Hyde (2002) Doing Empirical Political Research
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Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
Not entered |
| Keywords | Not entered |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Ugur Ozdemir
Tel: (0131 6)50 3990
Email: Ugur.Ozdemir@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Claire Buchan
Tel: (0131 6)50 8253
Email: Claire.Buchan@ed.ac.uk |
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