The final exam will consist of short-answer questions and essays. Anything that was discussed in class is fair game for inclusion on the final, especially if it was written on the board or appears in the online slides. That said, you should pay particular attention to the following topics:

• The difference between scientific methods: Pre-scientific, inductive, hypothetical-deductive, Popperian; contributions of Kuhn and Lakatos

• Structural functionalism vs. methodological individualism and their implications for research methodology

• The difference between qualitative and quantitative research and when each type is appropriate

• The difference between grounded theory, ethnographies, and case studies

• The structure of experimental design and its use in economics; natural experiments

• The features of a good research question

• How sub-problems are created and what they should and should not be

• The relationship between sub-problems and hypotheses; elements of a good hypothesis

• The importance of delimitations

• The importance of the literature review to the researcher; how a literature review should be presented

• The features of a good data collection strategy

• The importance of assumptions

• The difference between cross-sectional, time-series, and panel data; advantages and disadvantages of each

• The structure of a good research proposal, including the necessary contents of each section

• The elements of a well-designed survey

• The importance of a probability sample, how to collect one, and what to do when you cannot

• The advantages of various survey collection forms: In-person interviews, in-person questionnaires, telephone interviews

• Whom to choose for interviewers and the instructions to give them

• The importance of a codebook and what a codebook should contain

• How data should be coded and re-coded; why re-coding is sometimes necessary

• Why some observations need to be excluded from analysis and how it should be done

• How results should be reported and in what order

• What to do when the results are inconclusive

• The main elements of a report; the difference between how the report is written and how the proposal is written

• The purpose and elements of an abstract