Hi!
My name is Carlo and I teach political science, including data analysis, at the University of Stavanger in Norway.
I often find that students have quite smart ideas that they want to test in a course paper or thesis project and which could be tested with a relatively simple quantitative analysis – but they don’t know how to actually go about this (and might also be intimidated by quantitative methods/coding).
The aim of this blog is to show these students how they can test big ideas – e.g., about the role of class, social norms, political institutions, or gender – with relatively simple methods that they should be familiar with from their introductory statistics course and with the free and open-source R statistical programming language.
The posts are very much focussed on explaining the general logic of an analysis and assume that readers are at least a bit familiar with the basic of statistics and data analysis methods and how to work with R. Each post also gives pointers to more advanced resources (textbooks, journal articles) on quantitative methods.