02935 - Laboratory (Lab22)

Academic Year 2023/2024

  • Teaching Mode: Traditional lectures
  • Campus: Bologna
  • Corso: First cycle degree programme (L) in Political, Social and International Sciences (cod. 8853)

Course contents

The lab familiarizes students with search tools and repositories where to detect information for social research. To design and carry out scientific research, in fact, necessary skills involve finding information on previous research published on the topic; on the datasets and surveys available; and on aggregate indicators and measures of a variety of social realms (health, poverty, public policy). This lab serves as valuable support for students when writing essays, course papers, and final dissertations.

The lab comprises three blocks:

  1. Literature search (books, journal articles) for writing literature reviews and state-of-the-art on Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar (and many more), using “Boolean operators” in “search queries”
  2. Data repositories for data/survey search (UK Data Service, Gesis Data Archive)
  3. Databases containing indicators and measures at regional and national level, and historical data (Istat data warehouse, OECD Family database, Eurostat database, Our World in Data, and many more)

Each class comprises an introduction to the topic delivered by the instructor, and a hands-on session where students apply the notions learnt on a research question of their choice.

Readings/Bibliography

There is no specific bibliography for the lab. 
Ppt presentations and links with useful material, tutorials, and readings, will be provided during the sessions. 

Teaching methods

Frontal lectures and hands-on sessions.

Assessment methods

The lab online involves a pass/no pass evaluation. In order to pass the course, students are expected to actively participate to hands-on activities and carry out three take-home assignments during the course (one for each of the blocks).

Office hours

See the website of Francesca Zanasi