Syllabus:  Fall 2009
(50:920:301) Methods and Techniques of Social Research  

This Hybrid Internet class meets Thursday, September 3, 6 to 7:20 p.m. and 9:00 to 11:30 a.m. on Saturdays October 3, November 14 and December 19 in Fine Arts 110.  There will be weekly assignments posted online in the  course management system.  To find them, log onto SAKAI, look for the tab for our course, and click on "Weekly Assignments."  If you have taken many SAKAI courses before, you may have to rearrange your tabs to see our course.  Click on the My Workspace tab and on Membership to see all your courses.  Click on Preferences and Customize Tabs to set SAKAI so that your current courses appear at the top of the page.
            
Instructor:  Ted Goertzel   Office:  405 Cooper Street, Room 110.  Enter from the back of the building on Lawrence Street.    Office phone: 856 225-2714   email: goertzel@camden.rutgers.edu.  To find my home page type "Ted Goertzel" in Google or another search engine. 

This is an introductory course in the methods and techniques of social research as used in criminal justice, sociology and related fields. This course is a prerequisite for Ethics and Policy in Criminal Justice and Theories of Crime and Delinquency.

It is helpful if students have had at least an introductory course in sociology or criminal justice before taking this course.  Prior work in statistics is not required.  Topics include research design, conceptualization and measurement, sampling, experiments, survey research, evaluation research, quantifying data, scale construction, making graphs and data analysis.  Particular emphasis is placed on survey research and on time series analysis of trend data. 

 Specific objectives of this course are:
1. To learn enough about social research to be able to read original research reports published in social science journals.
2. To learn how to design questionnaires, collect survey data, and analyze the data.
3. To learn how to analyze data from published statistical sources such as The Statistical Abstract of the United States.
4. To learn how to use statistical software packages and how to access statistical data on the World Wide Web.
5. To learn how to make graphs of statistical data.
6. To develop skills in the logical and empirical analysis of social problems.
7. To learn how computerized statistics data ("CompStat") can be used in lowering crime rates and managing other social problems

The textbook for this course will be Understanding Research by W. Lawrence Neuman.    This book can be accessed in three ways:

  1. You can purchase it as a paperback book.  It will be ordered at the campus bookstore and is also available from the publisher, or from amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and other booksellers.  Some used copies are available online.  The list price is $67.50, but Barnes and Noble is a little cheaper.  This gets you a convenient bound volume with color graphics that may be more appealing than reading online.  Of course, you can keep the book for reference or recover part of the cost by selling it at the end of the term.
  2. You can buy a 180 day subscription to the electronic edition of the text for $33.60.  The content and illustrations are identical.  This allows you to read the book on a computer, and to print out pages, up to 10 pages at a time.  The electronic texts are also searchable.  There are two kinds of electronic texts, both of which cost the same:   Click Here for Access to Online or Downloadable Subscriptions.
    1. An online subscription allows you to read the book on any computer that is connected to the internet.  You do not need to install any software on your computer.  You can also get a refund within 14 days if you have not read or printed more than 20% of the book.  If you have reliable broadband service at home or wherever you will be studying, this may be the best electronic option.  Since this is on the Internet, it should work with any operating system.  You can try out the interface online before buying. 
    2. A downloadable subscription allows you to install the book on one computer.  You can then read it without having to be connected to the Internet.  But you can only read it on that one computer.  There are no refunds for downloadble subscriptions, if your computer should break down, I believe you would need to subscribe again, just as you would need to buy a paper book again if you lost it.
Considerable use is made of computers in this course.  No prior computer background or experience is assumed.  All assignments will  be in the SAKAI course management system.  We will use the Excel spreadsheet program, which you may already have as part of the Microsoft Office package, and the MicroCase Data Analysis System, which can be downloaded from SAKAI or from the publisher.  The software is all available in the computer labs on campus should you prefer to work there or have a problem with your own computer. 

The department has a site license for the Microcase program and the computer labs on campus have data sets in addition to those that will be used in this course.  You no longer need to borrow a cd from the department office to install this program, you can download it from our SAKAI site.  Thanks to the work of graduate Kim VanBuskirk, useful descriptions of some of the Microcase datasets are available online as part of a broad set of MicroCase Resources.  Also to be found there are instructions by graduate Debra Burock on how to create new datasets within MicroCase.  These students graduated in 2000, however, so they may not cover the most recent materials available.  The software itself is unchanged.