- Hi everyone. I am Marco. - Hi everybody. I'm Nick. - And I'm Leo Falabella. - Hi everyone. I'm Alex. I am so excited that you're here. In this video, we'll introduce the scientific method and this online resource. Let's get started! - Why have protests against police brutality in the United States led to police reform in some cities, but not others? Why do criminal groups in many countries attempt to influence elections? - Do presidential debates influence the outcome of elections? Are democracies really more peaceful than non-democracies? And how do we answer these questions in a rigorous and convincing manner? In other words, what does it mean to do political inquiry? - In this video, we'll introduce you to the questions that drive this course and provide you with a framework for integrating all of the things you learned in this class into one cohesive picture. We'll also talk about how to use this online resource most effectively. By the end of this course, you'll be able to: ask interesting questions about the political world, evaluate arguments about the political phenomena using data and quantitative methods, and think critically about the claims that other people make using data. In other words, you'll be able to use the scientific method to learn about the world around us. Let's start with a quick example. - Your friend brings you a graph showing each country's GDP and whether these countries are democratic or autocratic. Your friend points out that richer countries are more likely to be democracies. You then ask, "Does economic development lead a country to become democratic?" Your friend concludes that yes, look at the graph. Economic development leads to democratization. However, as you begin to think about this, you realize that there are many things that could cause a country to become democratic, things such as education, international intervention, revolutions, and widespread acceptance of liberal ideas. You then might start to think that maybe the level of education of the public is really what matters for a country to become democratic. It might be that education leads to critical thinking, the acceptance of liberal values, and also leads to economic development through improvements in human capital. So it might seem at first as though economic development is causing democratization, it actually turns out to be the case that it's higher levels of education, not economic development. The conclusion your friend made using the graph becomes less and less convincing. But how do we use data to figure out which factors actually lead to democratization and how much influence each factor has? To answer these questions, we must think about how to test our argument convincingly. But how do we do that? Well, the modules in this online resource will walk you through this entire process from asking a research question, formulating a hypothesis, gathering data, and testing your hypothesis. - And generally, these are the steps of the scientific method, the steps that scholars of political science use every day to learn about our political world. But there's actually a lot that can go wrong here, either due to honest mistakes or intentional misrepresentation. And so in this class, we'll walk you through all of the steps of political inquiry and point out where things go wrong so that you can be an informed consumer and producer of political data. Throughout, we pay special attention to those concepts that we know are most challenging for students based on our experience as TAs. Before we dive in, we have just a few notes about this online resource. - First, in these videos, we will focus mostly on working with quantitative data, but you should also be aware that there are other approaches to scientific inquiry, for example, qualitative methods like case studies and interviews, which are also useful and valid ways of learning about political phenomenon. Sometimes these types of qualitative designs may even be more appropriate than the quantitative methods we introduce you to in this course. For many of our research questions in social science, answers are often most convincing when they include both quantitative and qualitative evidence. As we'll see in this video series, quantitative data can tell us a lot, but it can't tell us everything. - Next, we want to introduce you to this online resource, what's here, and how to use it. In this online resource, you will find a series of modules. Each module has at least one video explaining an important concept. The modules also include additional resources and quiz questions. Even though the modules appear to you in a specific order, you should feel free to jump around and use the materials in the order you want. Also, be sure you are not only watching the videos. Be sure to think about and discuss how the material fits in with the rest of the course material. We especially encourage you to answer all the quiz questions. - You may have to watch the videos and take the quiz questions several times before you feel really confident that you've mastered the material, and that's okay, expected even. Finally, we wanna encourage you to work with your classmates when you feel like you don't understand how we got to the answer in a quiz question or you're having trouble with some of the material. - And that's basically it. We hope that these modules are helpful to you and we encourage you to make full use of the videos, quizzes, and additional resources.