Research Design in Economic Sociology

Designing and completing the PhD manuscript may be daunting and lonely exercise. This course is meant to support students in this endeavour. In particular, the course focuses on students’ research works by offering each student the opportunity to present, discuss, and get feedback on individual parts of their theses. Besides improving reciprocal knowledge and potential networking, the research design course aims at discussing, with reference to the specific projects, the main steps in the development of a research design: from the selection of the central research questions, to their theoretical framing, the case selection, the choice of the empirical methods of investigation, the challenges of field work, and the analysis and presentation of the results.

Involving participants at different stages of their academic experiences, the seminar also offers the opportunity to develop PhD’s skills in discussing and constructively contributing to each other research, both during the formal sessions and in successive informal meetings.