At the end of the class, students will
- Learn basic premises of major epistemological approaches to social research such as Positivism, Interpretivism.
- Learn several ontological approaches to social research such as Objectivism, Subjectivism, Constructivism.
- Learn several ethical concerns related to unobtrusive and desktop research (e.g. issues related to representation) and field research (e.g. rapport, informed consent, privacy, anonymity, undetectability).
- Learn issues about the ethics, quality and responsibility in utilizing other researchers' work.
- Identify central topic subtopics, research question and research problem in existing studies and develop those related to their own research projects.
- Examine various forms of literature reviews in existing academic works on MA level and compare their particular purpose, strenght and weaknesses.
- Learn purposes, uses, strenghts and weaknesses of several research designs, such as qualitative, quantitative and mixed research designs.
- Learn experimental cross-sectional, longtitutional, historical, historical-comparative, comparative, case study forms of social research.
- Learn research methods related to primary data gathering and analysis via discourse analysis, content analysis, narrative analysis, as well as secondary data gathering via structured interviews, surveys, semi-structured and unstructured interviews, focus group and participant observation and e-research.
- Develop and present their own research proposals and provide feedback for each other's proposals.