Oxford Spring School in Advanced Research Methods
Our hybrid Oxford Spring School in Advanced Research Methods offers graduate students and researchers from universities across the UK and abroad a unique opportunity to learn cutting-edge methods in Social Science.
Spring School 2023 ran from Monday 27 to Friday 31 March 2023. This year was the Oxford Spring School’s 20th Anniversary and we were excited to offer a new core course and a full morning programme of additional research methodology classes. The full course options for 2023 were as follows:
- Causal Inference with Vicente Dinis Valentim (Oxford): Students learnt a number of state-of-the-art tools to tackle difficulties in isolating a single factor whose effect one wants to study.
- Text Analysis with Tom O' Grady (UCL): This largely practical and hands-on course–relevant for students from any field of social science–taught students to collect and analyse texts using statistical and computational methods.
- Data Analysis for the Social Sciences with Spyros Kosmidis (Oxford): This was an introductory course on data analysis for social scientists and was designed for students with little or no knowledge of quantitative methods.
- Qualitative Methods with Marnie Howlett (Oxford): This course introduced students to the concepts, techniques, and data used with and collected using qualitative research methods.
- Machine Learning with Andreas Murr (Warwick): This course introduced students to the fundamental theories and concepts used across Machine Learning and how to various popular techniques.
If you are interested in joining future Oxford Spring School programmes please sign up to our mailing list.
See below testimonials from previous Spring School participants.
Anonymous Feedback from the Virtual Spring School 2022:
"I would like to thank Spyros, the teachers, and the support team for Spring School 2022 and putting the event together. I have enjoyed the week very much and learned much about useful methods of analysing text. The interactions with the teachers and fellow students was excellent!"
"Aside from words of gratitude to the instructor and the admin support team, a special huge thanks to Leonardo for the great refresher course and alerting us to the pitfalls of R and tidyverse. Great course! Thank you!"
Giuseppe Paparella, Spring School 2018
Doctoral candidate, King's College London
"The Oxford Spring School in Advanced Research Methods, which I attended in 2018, has been an excellent opportunity to build on my existing training in comparative case studies and to develop a broader and more sophisticated skillset. Especially with regards to process-tracing, and thanks to the inputs collected during the School’s lectures and informal sessions, I have been able to develop a better articulated and more precise theoretical framework for my doctoral project, as well as to refine its methodology. Importantly, the School’s faculty - which directly draws from the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford - is a real plus as it gathers scholars consistently published across the top academic journals, giving attendants a unique glimpse into the rigorous methodological processes required to generate first-rate research. Last but not least, the School has allowed me to explore new ideas and approaches, which I plan to develop and employ in future projects, and to meet other PhD students and ECRs from different research institutions across the world. I would definitely recommend to attend the Oxford Spring School in Advanced Research Methods to anybody considering it."