Summer Institute for Research Design in Cultural Anthropology

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This award supports a summer institute in research methods and project design for cultural anthropology graduate students. Expert social science methodologists will teach a set of 15 graduate students, chosen competitively from doctoral programs throughout the United States, in an intensive three week course. Course content will include: the relationship between theory and research objectives, concepts, definitions, variables, measures and hypotheses; the relationship between quantitative and qualitative approaches in the ethnographic context; systematic data collection procedures; probability and non-probability sampling; statistical distributions and elementary data analysis. The emphasis will be on concepts of research design, data management in both qualitative and quantitative contexts, and strategies of hypothesis testing. Anthropological research is inherently interdisciplinary and incorporates a wide variety of research methods. This program, which supplements the training students receive in their home departments, has trained over 204 students from 58 different institutions to date. This training increases the competence of students to do significant dissertation research projects and to become more proficient professional social scientists.