SSC 203: RESEARCH METHODS IN SOCIAL SCIENCES

This course introduces students to reading, writing and research for social scientists. It focuses on developing skills essential for conducting successful research including summarizing, critiquing, synthesizing, and analyzing scientific research. Emphasis is given to report writing such as literature reviews, lab reports, and research articles through practice and examples as well as critical reading. Students will be introduced to the method by which all scientists conduct research and will go through each stage of the research process beginning with hypothesis formation and ending with writing a research design paper. Along the way students will be exposed to the many types of writing in the sciences including annotated bibliographies, components of a scholarly research paper including abstracts, methods sections, results sections, communicating results in tables and figures, and discussion/conclusion sections. Pre-requisites: ENG 100 and/or ENG 101, and ENG 102 or ENG 103.