This is a collaborative and project-driven course. Students will learn how to collect, analyze, and visualize data to answer policy relevant questions, or questions of broad social scientific / sociological interest. We will work with open data provided by governments or organizations, and data mined from web sites and social media (e.g. Twitter). While having some prior experience with research methods and / or programming is advantageous, it is not necessary to do well in this course.
For students without any previous experience programming, this course will provide an applied -- and friendly -- introduction to programming for data collection and analysis using Python. For students with some programming experience, this course will provide an introduction to applied data analysis for policy and social science research.
Most recent syllabus available from the Department of Knowledge Integration upon request.