Daniel Stockemer - Quantitative Methods for the Social Sciences

Daniel Stockemer

Quantitative Methods for the Social Sciences A Practical Introduction with Examples in SPSS and Stata

Daniel Stockemer

School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

ISBN 978-3-319-99117-7 e-ISBN 978-3-319-99118-4

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99118-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018957702

Springer International Publishing AG 2019

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Contents

Under what conditions do countries go to war? What is the influence of the 20082009 economic crisis on the vote share of radical right-wing parties in Western Europe? What type of people are the most likely to protest and partake in demonstrations? How has the urban squatters movement developed in South Africa after apartheid? There is hardly any field in the social sciences that asks as many research questions as political science. Questions scholars are interested in can be specific and reduced to one event (e.g., the development of the urban squatters movement in South Africa post-apartheid) or general and systemic such as the occurrence of war and peace. Whether general or specific, what all empirical research questions have in common is the necessity to use adequate research methods to answer them. For example, to effectively evaluate the influence of the economic downturn in 20082009 on the radical right-wing success in the elections preceding the crisis, we need data on the radical right-wing vote before and after the crisis, a clearly defined operationalization of the crisis and data on confounding factors such as immigration, crime, and corruption. Through appropriate modeling techniques (i.e., multiple regression analysis on macro-level data) , we can then assess the absolute and relative influence of the economic crisis on the radical right-wing vote share.

Research methods are the bread and butter of empirical political science. They are the tools that allow researchers to conduct research and detect empirical regularities, causal chains, and explanations of political and social phenomena. To use a practical analogy, a political scientist needs to have a toolkit of research methods at his or her disposal to build good empirical research in the same way as a mason must have certain tools to build a house. It is indispensable for a mason to not only have some rather simple tools (e.g., a hammer) but also some more sophisticated tools such as a mixer or crane. The same applies for a political scientist. Ideally, he or she should have some easy tools (such as descriptive statistics or means testing) at his or her disposal but also some more complex tools such as pooled time series analysis or maximum likelihood estimation. Having these tools allows political scientists to both conduct their own research and judge and evaluate other peoples work. This book will provide a first simple toolkit in the area of quantitative methods, survey research, and statistics.

There is one caveat in methods training: research methods can hardly be learnt by just reading articles and books. Rather, they need to be learnt in an applied fashion. Similar to the mixture of theoretical and practical training a mason acquires during her apprenticeship, political science students should be introduced to methods training in a practical manner. In particular, this applies to quantitative methods and survey research. Aware that methods learning can only be fruitful if students learn to apply their theoretical skills in real-world scenarios, I have constructed this book on survey research and quantitative methods in a very practical fashion.

Through my own experience as a professor of introductory courses into quantitative method, I have learnt over and over again that students only enjoy these classes if they see the applicability of the techniques they learn. This book follows the structure as laid down in Fig. covers multivariate regression analysis).

Fig. 1.1

Different steps in survey research

The book can be used as a self-teaching device. In this case, students should redo the exercises with the data provided. In a second step, they should conduct all the tests with other data they have at their disposal. The book is also the perfect accompanying textbook for an introductory class to survey research and statistics. In the latter case, there is a built-in semester-long group exercise, which enhances the learning process. In the semester-long group work that follows the sequence of the book, students are asked to conceive, conduct, and analyze survey. The survey that is analyzed throughout is a colloquial survey that measures the amount of money students spend partying. Actually, the survey is an original survey including the original data, which one of my student groups collected during their semester-long project. Using this colloquial survey, the students in this study group had lots of fun collecting and analyzing their data, showing that learning statistics can (and should) be fun. I hope that the readers and users of this book experience the same joy in their first encounter with quantitative methods.

Springer International Publishing AG 2019

Daniel Stockemer Quantitative Methods for the Social Sciences https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99118-4_2

2. The Nuts and Bolts of Empirical Social Science

Daniel Stockemer

(1)

School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada