Objectives: Students will learn the basics of research methodology for applied social sciences. The course will prepare them for doing business-related research and prepare case studies.

Learning outcomes: Students will understand the basic concepts and procedures of the research process: the theory of social sciences, sampling, measurement, questionnaire construction, and data processing.

Students will apply the acquired knowledge appropriately in the context of a case study.

Contents: This course will cover basic Social Science Research. It will begin with reviewing the scientific method, and continue with problem identification, hypothesis formulation, and move on to an evaluation of various testing hypothesis testing methodologies. This will include quantitative as well as qualitative methodologies however there more emphasis will be given to quantitative approaches. Each methodology will be examined for its strengths and weaknesses. The course will review basic sampling issues as well as analysis through simple distributions and crosstabulations. Exploratory Data Analysis will be presented as method to review relationships between variables. For analysis, students will be introduced to PSPP, freeware which uses SPSS syntax. Data files will be stored in Excel files.

Methodology: Lectures with exercises.

Means of evaluation: Students will be graded on the basis of their participation which includes homework, and a final exam