Pre-course assignment

Read Bryman/Bell (2015), Ch 1-6. We expect you to be familiar with the core concepts from these chapters (quiz in the first unit).

Part 1:

Input lectures and discussion

- What is research?

- The importance of scientific analysis

- What is a research question and how is it identified?

- The research process

- The scientific discourse: presentation & publication of new ideas, research ethics

• Students get a first rough idea of what is scientific research
• Students understand the concept of a research question and how and why different research designs are used to answer certain research questions
• Students can identify major steps in assessing a scientific paper and can develop a master thesis topic and proposal research based on prior research 

≥ 80 % Attendance Requirement

If you are affected by quarantine or show symptoms of COVID-19 please contact your lecturer and do not participate in in-person lectures. Adjustments concerning the situation with COVID-19 will be announced in class / via email.

Input presentations by instructors, individual assignments, group work.

Compulsory attendance for input lectures (part 1), for group presentations (part 2) and individual presentations (part 3).  One to one consultation for the individual assignment (part 3) will be individually scheduled with the lecturers.

Pre-course-assignment/multiple-choice quiz: 10%  Attention: For all four masters thesis courses, the quiz will take place Online on October 6, 2022.

Group Assignment “Part 2”: 30%

Individual Assignment “Part 3”: 60%

For this course, only one of two grades (pass/fail) will be awarded.

A "pass" grade requires a minimum score of 50% for each assignment and 75% in total.

• Writing skills

• Ability to identify relevant literature using research databases. EBSCO, Proquest are accessible via https://www.wu.ac.at/en/library/finding-literature/databases/ (requires VPN connection (https://www.wu.ac.at/en/it/services/network/vpn) if not accessed from within WU network). Other resources: http://www.jstor.org (papers), http://katalog.wu.ac.at/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=WUW&prefLang=en_US (books from the various WU libraries). WU library’s CatalogPLUS also allows for easy searching for papers including SFX links for full text access.
• If you are new to WU or not familiar with the tools mentioned above, see https://learn.wu.ac.at/bibliothek/ which offers short introductions to searching by topic, search strategy, search tools, and reference management tools (Citavi, Endnote Web).

Prof. Patricia Klarner / Prof. Otto Janschek