Advanced Research Methods for Political Science Undergraduates

I have been both instructor of record of a series of undergraduate courses on Quantitative Research methods, as well as co-founding and creating content for a Ph.D. level methods “Bootcamp” for incoming Ph.D. students at UC Irvine. In both cases, the focus was on practical R knowledge with an approachable style.

For Cal Poly Pomona, I tought Advanced Research Methods specifically, which is an upper division research methods course that focuses on giving undergraduates the statistical tools and foundations to conduct their own research. I bolstered the existing course design of the department by shifting the course from using SPSS, to using R software with my original training process. Students end the class by conducting their own research using skills we wet over like manipulating data and fitting multiple statistical tests in R software.

I co-founded an intensive methods summer program for incoming first years to the UC Irvine Political Science department. This Bootcamp is grounded in a hands-on data approach designed to reduce the barriers to entry into the Political Science statistics sequence at UC Irvine. Additionally, it is meant to instill a belief in incoming graduate students that they are capable of understanding and performing quantitative methods. A rough template for how this Bootcamp plays out can be found here.

The primary goal for the course is to increase retention and encourage the use of quantitative methods generally. Specifically, we seek to increase retention and provide encouragement to womxn and POC. Many of our students with these identities have historically and currently been made to feel unwelcome and/or incapable of quantitative methods. We teach proficiency in R as it is a free platform that reduces the financial barriers to statistical computing. From there, we focus on building concrete tools students will need to perform the tasks they are expected to undertake as researchers at the graduate level but are often underserved by the current course offerings.

Video

Here is a sampling of an online lecture I recorded for Cal Poly Pomona students in 2023. This lecture was about the object orientation of R, and preliminary coding.