PS3257: Political Inquiry

Sem: AY20/21 Semester 1

Lecturer: Dr Elvin Ong

*note: all classes were conducted over Zoom due to the COVID-19 pandemic

Overview: Apart than PS1101E, this is the only other mod that’s compulsory for all Pol Sci majors. Unlike many other PolSci mods, this is a lot more technical that’s meant to teach essential research skills that will help us to conduct our own independent research, especially for those intending to do a Honours Thesis. Quite a number of people actually develop their Honours Theses based on their research papers for this module soo yea :’)

Lectures were geared towards the big-picture concepts of qualitative and quantitative research. In the first 3 weeks, Dr Elvin covered the foundational stuff such as descriptive/causal inference, and other stuff surrounding a concept. What makes up a concept? How do you measure a concept? What kind of indicators can we use to represent an abstract concept? For subsequent lectures, each week focuses on a particular research method before moving on to academic case studies in which the method was used. Personally, I found this very useful as the explanations in the readings can be very technical at times, and the case studies helped me to gain a better understanding as to how to actually apply this method for a possible research study. However, I didn’t really like how Dr Elvin tried to run the lectures like seminars over Zoom, where he gives people a chance to ask questions halfway through the lesson and he himself expects an answer to the question he poses to the class. This isn’t very ideal for a Zoom lecture of over 70 people as the same people ended up speaking up all the time and it became common for lectures to overrun by 20 minutes on average each week :/

Tutorials were focused on developing our competencies in R and honestly it wasn’t that bad. I got Thiya as my tutor and he was extremely competent and patient in explaining and demonstrating the different R functions to a group of clueless social science students. It’s his first time being a TA but he’s really someone that knows his stuff and he’s quick to reply your emails whenever you face any difficulties throughout the module. Also, after much feedback from previous iterations of the mod, webcasts for tutorials are now uploaded on LumiNUS to help us refresh our memory on how to execute certain R functions, especially when completing HW3.

Assessment:

Participation (10%): Attendance for lectures and tutorials are recorded. Speaking up during lectures also counts towards your participation grade.

Homework 1 (20%): HW1 involves deconstructing a well-known concept and determining whether the measurements of the concept are flawed, and consider how might one choose to improve the concept should one conduct research using those measures.

Homework 2 (15%): HW2 assessed our understanding one of the research methodologies taught in class. It involves reading a research paper and answering some questions about it. Dr Elvin used point-based marking for this assessment (basically, you get a mark if your answer contains a point in the marking scheme), and I ended up missing many of these points LOL. Did quite badly (barely passed) this assessment so I knew that I had to work super hard if I wanted to salvage my grade for this mod.

Homework 3 (15%): HW3 tested our competency in the quantitative aspects of research. This involved R programming and contained questions ranging from importing datasets, recoding variables and conducting regression analyses. Not that difficult if you had paid attention during tutorials and we even had a tutorial session where the questions were very similar to the eventual content of HW3. The notes I took during tutorials were really a huge lifesaver and I really did feel a sense of accomplishment after completing the homework on my own.

Research Paper (10% Lit Review + Proposed Design, another 30% for the actual report): The paper comprises of the following parts: Intro, Lit Review, Theory, Methodology, Findings and Conclusion. Dr Elvin made our lives easier by breaking up the assignment into a Research Proposal (due W8) and Final Essay (due W13). The Research Proposal comprises of the Intro, Lit Review and Methodology and it gives your markers a chance to give comments and suggest areas for improvement. Thankfully, I did quite well for my Research Proposal and I only had to make a couple of edits before moving on to the other parts. The process itself was painful to say the least, as I had to decide on a research topic and consult a wide range of sources for both my lit review and my findings. It was also important to demonstrate competency in at least one of the research methodologies taught in the course. Juggling all of these was really not easy, and you can imagine my sense of joy when I finally completed the essay. At 4000 words, this is prolly one of the longest essays I will ever do as an undergrad, and I’m just really glad that I ended this module on a good note [I got A- for this paper in the end :’) ]