Meets the following requirements: HS   

This is an advanced course for (third/fourth-year or graduate) students in research design that helps students understand complex social problems that require sophisticated research methods to investigate and respond to complex human problems such as poverty, inequity, exploitation, and cultural conflict. Students will deepen their understanding of systemic or global problems and epistemologies (e.g., local and academic) and methodologies that help or hinder problem-solving in interconnected socioeconomic systems. Students will gain skills in redefining problems, framing questions worth asking, assessing the strengths and limitations of various methodologies in human studies, designing studies that are valid, valuable, and feasible, articulating broader implications or generalizations using a combination of most appropriate methodologies, and identifying relevant applications. Methods of interest include, for example, ethnographic interviews, participatory and/or community based research, econometric models, statistical analysis of sociological data, historiography using primary texts, SWOT analysis and other forms of planning processes, Rapid Rural Assessment, Illuminative Evaluation, Total Quality Management, et cetera. The key focus of seminar sessions will be on the methodological challenges of approaching a project in a human ecological way - i.e. how to do define problems, do research, and tie it into praxis when a project involves multiple disciplines, multiple points of view, multiple stake holders and the urgencies of time and scarcity of resources characteristic of real world challenges. Readings will include THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS, THE EVALUATION OF CULTURAL ACTION, THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW and works by Langer, Harding, Lincoln and Guba, among others. Evaluation will be based on class participation, responses to readings, a series of brief essays, works in progress reports on plans for research and critical reviews of the methods of human ecology research projects undertaken by others.

Level: Advanced.  Signature of instructor required.  Class limit: 12.  *HS*