Courses
While a great deal of student training occurs while students are employed as research assistants, the Survey Lab also provides formal methods training. Each Fall and Winter, the Survey Lab offers "Overview of Survey Research," a research design course geared for graduate students. Weekly assignments allow students to get detailed feedback on pieces of their project plans prior to submitting their final proposals at the end of the quarter. The class takes students in summary fashion through the many steps involved in social science research: defining a specific research question, finding funding, designing qualitative and quantitative data collection forms, practical data collection procedures, coding and cleaning data, and considerations in data analysis, and report writing. Twenty-nine students enrolled in the course in the 2002-2003 academic year.
In the Winter and Spring Quarters, the Lab teaches a graduate-level two-quarter research practicum. Each year the students have the opportunity to work on a real research project with a real client. The topic of study varies each year. Students become deeply immersed in the project design and then conduct some part of all phases of the subsequent project work. Orchestrating work for a practicum is difficult with large class sizes; consequently, we restrict the class size to ten students in order to maximize team building and student involvement in each phase of the study.
