Thursday, January 10, 2008

Short Introduction to Political Analysis

Here's a quick outline with links that should hopefully get you up to speed for the material in this course (originally posted, 8/25/06):

Scientific Method

A. Theory

B. Hypotheses

- Independent and Dependent Variables

C. Operationalization and Measurement

D. Testing (case studies versus quantitative methods)

- Correlation (also here) and types of relationships (negative, positive, no relationship, and spurious relationship)

E. Other issues:

1.) Because we don’t always have a random sample, there will usually be a problem of selection bias

2.) Many issues we will deal with also will have complicated causal logics, even perhaps including some endogeneity

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