Survey Lab staff and faculty adjuncts regularly offer courses in social science research methodology to University of Chicago graduate and undergraduate students. Course listings change regularly; below are descriptions of commonly-offered courses. In addition, the Survey Lab offers a research practicum for advanced graduates students in topics around qualitative research for questionnaire design.

SOCI 30118 – Survey Research Overview

This course is designed to walk you through the many phases of interview-based research, with an emphasis on overall research design that links each design decision to a central research question within the limits of time and budget constraints. Topics covered include sampling, questionnaire construction and data collection.

SOCI 40164 – Involved Interviewing

This in-depth investigation into interviewing hard-to-pentrate communities and populations begins with the assumption that the researcher as interviewer is an integral part of the research process. We turn a critical eye on the interviewer’s role in getting others to talk and learn strategies that encourage fertile interviews regardless of the situational context.

SOCI 40177 – Coding & Analyzing Qualitative Data

In this hands-on course, students learn how to organize and manage text-based data in preparation for analysis and final report writing of small-scale research projects.

SOCI – Survey Research Practicum

Survey research consists of four interlocking parts – the research question, sampling, questionnaire design, and data collection operations.  The Survey Research Practicum provides students with real world experience understanding how these processes affect each other by having them work as a group to plan and administer a mixed-mode survey with a probability, address-based sample.   Using a ready-to-field survey that includes slots for students to plug in alternate question versions, and an experimental design to assess different fielding approaches, the course will demonstrate how trade-off decisions in the planning phase may affect total survey error. This is a hands-on course in which students will take part in the actual how-to of data collection. Students take part in every phase of the operational design and project execution.