ESSEX/Nuffield CESS Experimental Summer School: 23 June - 5 July and 7 - 18 July 2014

[ozan aksoy]

Dear all,

The Essex/Nuffield CESS Experimental Summer School will be held in Oxford, in conjunction with the University of Essex. Two sessions will be held this year, with the first taking place from June 23 – July 4, and the second taking place July 7 – 18.

Course Content

The Experimental Summer School will be held at the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS) at Nuffield College Oxford.  CESS has a fully-equipped experimental lab which will be an integral part of the Summer School instruction (http://cess-web.nuff.ox.ac.uk/).  All course lectures and lab sessions will be held at the Nuffield College CESS. The program includes a welcome reception and dinner as well as a guided Oxford tour.   

The course is coordinated by Prof. Raymond Duch (Oxford University) and will be taught by a number of prominent scholars in the field of experimental social science. The course covers the design, implementation, and analytic tools necessary for conducting social science experiments. In the first week, the focus will be on laboratory experiments. After an introduction in experimental designs and a review of recent topics in experimental social sciences, the reminder of the first week will be hands-on lab experiments. Participants will learn how to program experiments with z-Tree, work with the subject recruitment software, analyse experimental data and run a lab experiment at the Nuffield Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS). In the first half of the second week, the course will cover field and online experiments. Moreover, in two afternoon sessions, participants will have the opportunity to present their own experimental research and receive feedback from an experienced team of instructors. The reminder of the second week will cover topics of causal inference and experimental approaches to data analysis. Upon completion of the course participants should be able to (1) formulate research questions that can be addressed using experiments, (2) design and carry out experiments, and (3) analyse and interpret results from social sciences experiments.

Course Objectives

The objectives of the course are to provide researchers with all of the design, implementation, and analytic tools necessary for conducting an experimental research project. The objective is to provide students with all of the theoretical foundations for designing, conducting and analyzing experiments but also to learn all of the implied applied aspects of implementing an experiment. For example, students will have an opportunity to implement a lab experiment including designing, programming the experiments in Z-Tree, working with the subject recruitment software, recruiting subjects, conducting the experiment with actual subjects, and analyzing the data. This course is appropriate for students, from any discipline, who expect to include experimental research as part of their research agenda. It is also appropriate for students who want to become informed consumers of experimental research scholarship.

Course Prerequisites

Students should have a basic background in research design and basic statistics. For example, with respect to research design, they should understand such basic concepts such as exogeneity, control group, and confounding effects. And with respect to basic statistics they should understand the principals of ordinary least squares regression; how to calculate simple measures of association; and have some familiarity with a statistical software package.

Fees and registration

The tuition fees for a two-weeks course is £1000 for academic and £1300 for non-academic participants. Fees include the cost of all ESSENTIAL course support material. Deadline for application is 1st May 2014. Applications should be made via the online form http://www.essex.ac.uk/summerschool/form/form.aspx. More information about the course can be obtained from ce...@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.

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Ozan Aksoy

Research Fellow

Centre for Experimental Social Sciences,

Nuffield College & Department of Sociology

University of Oxford

New Road, OX1 1NF, Oxford, UK

+44186 5614991, www.ozanaksoy.com,

ozan.aksoy[at]sociology.ox.ac.uk,

ozan.aksoy[at]nuffield.ox.ac.uk

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