Methods and Advisers

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-centred Institutionalism (Anton Hemerijck, Stephanie Hofmann, Waltraud Schelkle)
• Agent-based computational models (Arnout van de Rijt)
• Applied Normative and Comparative Analysis of Public Policies (Anton Hemerijck, Waltraud Schelkle)
• Comparative and Historical Case Studies (Jeffrey T. Checkel, Raffaella A. Del Sarto, Tasha Fairfield, Stefano Guzzini, Anton Hemerijck, Stephanie Hofmann, Waltraud Schelkle)
• Comparative Cross-National Research (Raffaella A. Del Sarto,Valentina Di Stasio, Tasha Fairfield, Anton Hemerijck, Stephanie Hofmann, Filip Kostelka, Léa Pessin,  Waltraud Schelkle, Herman van de Werfhorst)
• Concept Analysis (Stefano Guzzini, Stephanie Hofmann)
• Computational Text Analysis: (Kevin Munger) 
• Demography and demographic methods (Juho Härkönen, Léa Pessin)
• Discourse analysis (Stefano Guzzini)
• Event History Analysis (Juho Härkönen, Léa Pessin)
• Experimental Methods (Elias Dinas, Valentina Di Stasio, Filip Kostelka, Kevin Munger, Sascha Riaz,  Arnout van de Rijt)
• Interviewing Elites (Jeffrey T. Checkel, Raffaella A. Del Sarto, Tasha Fairfield, Stephanie Hofmann, Waltraud Schelkle)
• Longitudinal and life course analysis (Valentina Di Stasio, Juho Härkönen, Léa Pessin, Arnout van de Rijt, Herman van de Werfhorst)
• Multilevel Analysis (Valentina Di Stasio, Juho Härkönen, Léa Pessin, Herman van de Werfhorst)
• Panel Analysis (Juho Härkönen, Filip Kostelka,Léa Pessin, Herman van de Werfhorst)
• Process Tracing (Jeffrey T. Checkel, Raffaella A. Del Sarto, Tasha Fairfield,  Stefano Guzzini, Anton Hemerijck, Stephanie Hofmann, Waltraud Schelkle)
• Qualitative Bayesian Reasoning (Tasha Fairfield)
• Qualitative & Ethnographic Methods (Jeffrey T. Checkel, Raffaella A. Del Sarto, Stefano Guzzini,  Stephanie Hofmann)
• Research Analytics Unit (Daniel Urquijo)
• Research Design (Raffaella A. Del Sarto, Elias Dinas, Tasha Fairfield, Stefano Guzzini, Juho Härkönen, Anton Hemerijck, Stephanie Hofmann, Filip Kostelka, Kevin Munger, Léa Pessin, Waltraud Schelkle, Sascha Riaz, Arnout van de Rijt, Herman van de Werfhorst)
• Research Ethics (Jeffrey T. Checkel, Kevin Munger)
• Social Network Analysis (Arnout van de Rijt)
• Statistical Models and Causal Inference (Valentina Di Stasio, Elias Dinas, Juho Härkönen, Filip Kostelka, Léa Pessin, Kevin Munger, Sascha Riaz, Arnout van de Rijt, Herman van de Werfhorst)
• Survey Research and Analysis (Filip Kostelka, Kevin Munger,  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:

• Indicate what kind of help you need (e.g., research design, data cleaning, analysis & interpretation, etc).
• Provide the necessary materials, ideally reproducible example [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5963269/how-to-make-a-great-r-reproducible-example] and data.

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.