Essex Summer School in
Social Science Data Analysis

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Raymond Duch

Raymond Duch is the University of Oxford Professor in Quantitative Political Science and a Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College. Prior to assuming this position he was the Senator Don Henderson Scholar in Political Science at the University of Houston. He received his BA (Honours) from the University of Manitoba in Canada and his MA and PhD from the University of Rochester. In addition, he has held visiting appointments at the Hoover Institute and the Graduate School of Management, Stanford University, The Institute for Social Research Oslo and the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung. Professor Duch is currently Associate Editor of the American Journal of Political Science; recently served on the 2004 Planning Committee for the American National Election Studies; and was recently a member of the National Science Foundation Political Science Advisory Panel.

0F Experiments

Raymond Duch, Nuffield College Oxford
24 June - 5 July (two week course / 35 hrs)

Detailed Course Outline [PDF]

THIS COURSE IS NOW FULLY BOOKED AND A WAITING LIST IS IN OPERATION

Course Content

The Experimental Summer School will be held at the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS) at Nuffield College Oxford.  CESS has a fully-equipped experimental lab which will be an integral part of the Summer School instruction (http://cess-wb.nuff.ox.ac.uk/).  All course lectures and lab sessions will be held at the Nuffield College CESS.  

The course will be taught by a number of prominent scholars in the field of experimental social science. 

The course covers the design, implementation, and analytic tools necessary for conducting social science experiments. In the first week, the focus will be on laboratory experiments. After an introduction in experimental designs and a review of recent topics in experimental social sciences, the reminder of the first week will be hands-on lab experiments. Participants will learn how to program experiments with z-Tree, work with the subject recruitment software, analyse experimental data and run a lab experiment at the Nuffield Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS). In the first half of the second week, the course will cover field and online experiments. Moreover, in two afternoon sessions, participants will have the opportunity to present their own experimental research and receive feedback from an experienced team of instructors. The reminder of the second week will cover topics of causal inference and experimental approaches to data analysis. Upon completion of the course participants should be able to (1) formulate research questions that can be addressed using experiments, (2) design and carry out experiments, and (3) analyse and interpret results from social sciences experiments.

Course Objectives

The objectives of the course are to provide researchers with all of the design, implementation, and analytic tools necessary for conducting an experimental research project.  The course instructors all have extensive experience in designing and implementing field, lab, on-line and neuro experiments.  In addition, the course will take place at the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS) which is a new facility and has a state-of-the-art lab facility; the neuro-experimental component of the course will have access to the Oxford’s extensive neuro-imaging equipment and facilities.  The objective is to provide students with all of the theoretical foundations for designing, conducting and analyzing experiments but also to learn all of the implied applied aspects of implementing an experiment.  For example, students will have an opportunity to implement a lab experiment including designing, programming the experiments in Z-Tree, working with the subject recruitment software, recruiting subjects, conducting the experiment with actual subjects, and analyzing the data.

 This course is appropriate for students, from any discipline, who expect to include experimental research as part of their research agenda.  It is also appropriate for students who want to become informed consumers of experimental research scholarship.

Course Prerequisites

Students should have a basic background in research design and basic statistics.  For example, with respect to research design, they should understand such basic concepts such as exogeneity, control group, and confounding effects.  And with respect to basic statistics they should understand the principals of ordinary least squares regression; how to calculate simple measures of association; and have some familiarity with a statistical software package.