KSOD 2575 - Comparative social survey analysis

How should a compelling research project be written? How should comparative social research be approached? How to design a comparative research protocol? Students will be guided in the complex process of putting together a comparative research project through 24 lectures led by four experts in comparative social research. After the introductory lecture (on ‘Why and How We Compare?'), the course is comprised of four modules characterized by different methodological and thematic characteristics. The first module will introduce a classic type of comparative research comparisons: that based on macro-units of analysis. The conceptual lectures will discuss how macro comparisons have been traditionally used to describe and look for causation. The lectures will mix examples employing historical and quantitative methods, and will mostly rely on comparative social policy literature. The case for description will be illustrated through the long-standing debate on welfare regimes, and the examples related with causation will embrace comparative historical analysis on states and revolution and from a quantitative perspective the controversial debate on social capital. The module will also approach two practical aspects of comparative research. The first is the illustration of several datasets currently used in comparative research (and how they have been used in some case) and the second will provide the first bases to write a comparative research project. During this laboratory we will unveil and detail the main characteristics that your research project will have to display. The second module will shift the focus to the analysis of social change. Students will be introduced to concepts found in comparative life course sociology and demography that are used to analyze change across various dimensions of time, such as individual age, historical period, birth cohort, and familial generation. Research examples that will be reviewed in the lectures will concentrate on change in individual life courses, such as the increasing complexity of careers and diversity of family lives. In the practical lab sessions, students will learn the difference between cross-sectional and longitudinal panel data. Moreover, students will have the opportunity to work with the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) to replicate empirical research from the lectures. The third module will address a common tool used to draw comparisons at different levels: indicators. To learn more about indicators, we will focus on one particular issue: gender equality. We will analyze existing indicators that try to measure gender egalitarianism and evaluate alternative ways to construct other indicators. In the practical sessions, we will use the European Social Survey as an example, and students will develop their own questionnaire to measure gender egalitarianism, and develop their own indicators to compare them with existing ones. The fourth and last module will address qualitative, inter-local and mixed-method comparisons, drawing mainly from the study of urban segregation. We will first focus on the role and constraints of comparison in ethnographic and interview-based research, as well as on how cultural sociology has developed a hermeneutics of meaning-making processes to identify their patterns, and analyze and compare them across national or local contexts. We will then explore how monographic and comparative approaches can be dovetailed into one single research design, and how quantitative analysis and qualitative process-tracing are often combined to better set and conduct inter-local comparison. In the practical lab sessions, we will reflect upon inter-group urban mixing and exposure, on how to choose neighborhoods to study in different cities when the case selection is based on similarity or conversely on maximum variance, and on how to weave together macro and micro analytical levels. The different modules are interlinked by a series of labs aimed at helping student in the construction of their comparative research project. Five labs are specifically focused on different components of the research design: ‘how to write a comparative research project', ‘formulating research questions', ‘data for your project', integrating qualitative and quantitative research', and ‘logics of demonstration and writing skills'. A corollary of these five labs are six other labs which focus on specific aspects of the different modules. The students will be guided through the appraisal of data for comparative macro research, type of life course data, the replication of research, how to construct a questionnaire, how to analyze data from a questionnaire descriptively, and ethnography and comparison. The mixture of theoretical and practical labs will help students to write a comparative research project and develop fundamental skills to write their dissertation.

Zachary VAN WINKLE,Emanuele FERRAGINA,Olivier BORRAZ,Marta DOMINGUEZ FOLGUERAS

Séminaire

**********, English

The objective of the course is to enable students to design a comparative research project. This objective involves the discussion of a variety of theoretical principles and research examples coming from different fields in sociology - chiefly comparative social policy, life course sociology and demography, gender, urban sociology - and the development of practical skills in eleven labs during the course.

Spring 2023-2024

The students will have to develop a comparative research design project. For this task they are free to choose something related to their dissertation or pick up a different example. The characteristics of the project will be illustrated in lecture 6. Moreover, practical laboratories will be held during the course in order to help students develop their research skills. The maximum length for the project should be 3000 words. The project has to be submitted on Moodle. Specific information on the requirements and submission dates will be discussed on the first day of class.