PR1000 introduces students to the academic study of Politics and International Relations. It is the first of three full-year modules – PR1000, PR2000 and PR3000 – which Politics and International Relations students take during each of their undergraduate yearThe class concerns HOW we acquire knowledge about political ideas, institutions and practices; and how we can carry out and understand empirical research, using both qualitative and quantitative approaches. It provides an essential tool kit to help us answer questions about what happens in Politics and International Relations and how we can explain or describe different political phenomena. We start the course focusing on qualitative methods and focus on interviews, focus group research and qualitative text analysis. It is only a small step from qualitative text analysis to quantitative text analysis, which we will cover during the second term.

PR1000 focuses on the practical issues of research in Politics and International Relations: the principles that guide scholars in Politics and International Relations as they conduct research, the kinds of questions they ask, and the variety of decisions that they must make in order to answer them. Analysing these issues will provide a strong platform to judge the merits of different arguments presented in academic literature and help students to be able to distinguish the good from the bad or unconvincing.