Program Overview

The SNaPP Lab Boot Camp

The purpose of the SNaPP Lab Boot Camp is to expose new lab members to the kinds of research conducted in the lab, as well as train them with the basic techniques they'll need to successfully design and execute their own individual and group research projects. Students receive two credits of GOVT 394 credit each semester for completing all the requirements of the boot camp. Boot camp meets once a week for an hour, with 4-6 hours of independent work, on average.

Fundamentals

The purpose of these introductory sessions is to teach best practices in finding research materials related to the work done in the lab, as well as how to critically read and summarize what is found. By the end of this unit, participants should be confident in their abilities to:

• find high-quality research (published and posted online)
• read that research with a more critical eye toward what scholars say they've demonstrated versus what they actually do
• synthesize literature on a research topic to assess the "conversation" that scholars have with one another through their work The key distinction in a literature review is identifying a hole in the existing scholarship that can be persuasively argued to be addressed with one's own research. End Product: In addition to several smaller assignments and handouts, at the end of this unit, participants will produce an abbreviated literature review about the work of one particular scholar or one particular method in the field.

Research Design

During the second part of boot camp, the foundations of research design will be discussed, including questions like:

• What makes for a good research question?
• How to apply existing research theories to ideas
• How to design research with falsifiable hypotheses
• What it means to "operationalize" variables
• How to be confident that causality is being assessed and not just studying correlational patterns in the world
• What defines an experiment and how to design one End Product: In addition to several smaller assignments and handouts, at the end of this unit, participants will produce a proto research design document, where they propose a feasible study to collect data related to a puzzle that interests them.

The Tools of the Trade

In the third unit of Boot Camp, the focus is on equipping participants to analyze quantitative data. Social scientists are increasingly using a free software program called R to analyze and visualize data. Participants will work through the SSRMC's R Module, which introduces them to the software and some basic techniques. They will also complete an assignment to help them apply what they've learned to an actual dataset. End Product: At the beginning of the spring semester, participants will turn in a data report including their R code and analysis from a dataset assigned to them. Over the course of the semester, they will either continue to refine and extend their analysis of that dataset, or apply what they've learned to a dataset of their choosing, in order to complete a polished, thorough report.

Effective Communication

Writing an academic manuscript requires skills beyond what participants have likely been taught before. In this unit, the focus will be on the best practices for structuring an article that reports the findings of original research. The skills learned so far will help participants write the front half of a paper; here, the focus will be on the presentation and interpretation of results and effective strategies for framing the paper to have maximum impact. End Product: In addition to several smaller assignments and handouts, at the end of this unit, participants will build on their data report by adding the methods, results, discussion, and conclusion sections based on the analysis they've conducted.