The EUI is an exclusive (small) research institution, offering a high-quality Ph.D. programme in four disciplines (political philosophy and theory, political science, sociology, and international relations).
Faculty members are selected on substantive grounds, all operating at the methodological vanguard in their areas of specialization.
Altogether, the SPS department makes up for a cross-disciplinary environment with a strong commitment to:
- Puzzle- or question-driven research
- Methodological pluralism.
As a consequence of the small and selective substantive and makeup of the faculty, the SPS department does not have a professorial chair in methods, but each professor is specialized in a range of social science research methodologies.
Methods and Adviser
- Actor-centered Institutionalism (Anton Hemerijck, Stephanie Hofmann, Ellen Immergut, Waltraud Schelkle)
- Agent-based computational models (Arnout van de Rijt)
- Applied Normative and Comparative Analysis of Public Policies (Anton Hemerijck, Ellen Immergut, Waltraud Schelkle)
- Comparative and Historical Case Studies (Jeffrey T. Checkel, Miriam Golden, Stefano Guzzini, Anton Hemerijck, Stephanie Hofmann, Ellen Immergut, Waltraud Schelkle)
- Comparative Cross-National Research (Miriam Golden, Anton Hemerijck, Stephanie Hofmann, Ellen Immergut, Filip Kostelka, Waltraud Schelkle, Herman van de Werfhorst)
- Concept Analysis (Stefano Guzzini, Stephanie Hofmann, Ellen Immergut)
- Demography and demographic methods (Juho Härkönen)
- Discourse analysis (Stefano Guzzini)
- Event History Analysis (Juho Härkönen)
- Experimental Methods (Elias Dinas, Miriam Golden, Filip Kostelka, Arnout van de Rijt)
- Interviewing Elites (Jeffrey T. Checkel, Stephanie Hofmann, Miriam Golden, Waltraud Schelkle)
- Longitudinal and life course analysis (Juho Härkönen, Arnout van de Rijt, Herman van de Werfhorst)
- Multilevel Analysis (Juho Härkönen, Herman van de Werfhorst)
- Panel Analysis (Juho Härkönen, Filip Kostelka, Herman van de Werfhorst)
- Process Tracing (Jeffrey T. Checkel, Stefano Guzzini, Anton Hemerijck, Stephanie Hofmann, Ellen Immergut, Waltraud Schelkle)
- Qualitative & Ethnographic Methods (Jeffrey T. Checkel, Stefano Guzzini, Stephanie Hofmann)
- Research Analytics Unit (Pau Grau)
- Research Design (Elias Dinas, Miriam Golden, Stefano Guzzini, Juho Härkönen, Anton Hemerijck, Stephanie Hofmann, Ellen Immergut, Filip Kostelka, Waltraud Schelkle, Arnout van de Rijt, Herman van de Werfhorst)
- Research Ethics (Jeffrey T. Checkel, Miriam Golden)
- Social Network Analysis (Arnout van de Rijt)
- Statistical Models and Causal Inference (Elias Dinas, Juho Härkönen, Filip Kostelka, Arnout van de Rijt, Herman van de Werfhorst)
- Survey Research and Analysis (Filip Kostelka, Herman van de Werfhorst)
- Theory building and critique - (Stefano Guzzini)
Research Analytics Unit
The Research Analytics Unit has been created with the purpose of helping PhD researchers facing coding and data analysis problems. This involves helping researchers set up a reproducible workflow, establish a research design, data cleaning and analysis.
Coding is a dynamic process with a learning curve that can be steep. The facilitator can offer tools to make the process of learning and executing code less painstaking. With that purpose, there are two ways to use the service:
Individual support: SPS Researchers can contact the unit through the e-mail [email protected]. Please follow these steps:
- Clearly indicate what kind of help you need (e.g., research design, data cleaning, analysis & interpretation, etc).
- Provide the necessary materials, ideally code and data – code should be written in an easily reproducible way, see here for guidance on this.
Online resources: Apart from individual meetings/e-mails, there is a website with potentially useful resources. This resource hub will be continually updated, and we welcome suggestions from researchers. You can submit suggestions by creating issues or pull requests.
Depending on demand, we may also organize practical sessions and workshops to address common problems. Please keep in mind that this is a new service, and we will adapt our approach based on your needs and feedback. This is a new service offered by the department, so we will adapt our approach as we go along.
Pau Grau holds a BA in Political Science from Pompeu Fabra University, where he also did his MRes. He also holds a MA in Political Science from the University of Konstanz with a specialisation in quantitative analysis. Here, he also served as a data tutor for BA and MA students, and before entering the EUI, he worked as Data Tutor at University of Konstanz, TA for the course “Data Analysis for IR”, and an RA at the University of Barcelona and University of Konstanz. He has developed most of the coding skills by ,”practicing” and he is happy to share his skills with the SPS community.