Fall 2007 Course Description
Advanced Empirical Methods for Policy Analysis
| Section Title: |
Empirical Analysis of Survey Data |
| Instructor(s): |
Cynthia Osborne |
| Course: |
P A 397C - Advanced Empirical Methods for Policy Analysis
(previously Applied Quantitative Analysis II) |
| Unique Number: |
65825 |
| Day & Time: |
Wednesdays, 9:00 AM - 12:00 PM |
| Room: |
SRH 3.108 |
| Waitlist Information: | For LBJ Students: UT Waitlist Information |
This course fulfills requirements for the following specialization(s):
- Social and Economic Policy
Description: This course will teach students to interpret, analyze, and write an empirical research paper. The course is designed for students who will pursue a career in research or policy analysis and will emphasize applied research methods rather than theory.
Using data from the longitudinal Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study (See Note), students will:
- formulate a policy-based research question,
- learn to write a theoretically based literature review,
- apply appropriate empirical methods to answer the research question(s),
- use STATA to analyze the data, and
- write up the results in a clear and concise manner paying particular attention to the policy implications of the results.
Student will learn:- how to interpret results from regression analyses
- fundamental multivariate modeling techniques
- the limitations of survey data
- how to handle issues of selection and omitted variable bias
- the difference between control and mediating variables
- the appropriate use of moderating variables and how to interpret interaction coefficients.
An empirical research paper will be the final product, but we will work on the various components of the paper over the course of the semester, and each section will be graded separately.
Note:The Fragile Families Study is a longitudinal, birth cohort survey that interviewed 5000 low-income, urban mothers (and 80% of the fathers) in the hospital at the birth of their child. 3500 of the mothers were unmarried. The mothers (and fathers) were reinterviewed when the child was age 1, 3, and 5, and information on the child?s health and behavioral outcomes was gathered on the child at ages 3 and 5. The data provide a rich set of variables to explore various dimensions of poverty, social policy, and families living in disadvantaged environments including employment, welfare, incarceration, family formation, child care, parenting, health, and child well-being. Students who have access to their own data sets may gain approval to substitute those data for the Fragile Families data.Return to Fall 2007 Course Schedule