Introduction to Methods and Data Analysis

This page is designed to provide assistance with methods and data analysis and provide you a list of office on campus that can help you write and do this section of your paper. If you need help with your research please contact the Political Science Librarian, Brea Henson.

Methods and Data Analysis

In political science at UNT, you are expected to use empirical quantitative methods that combine mathematics, statistics, and theory. You will be asked to complete equations and use software to produce charts, graphs, and tables that express the significance or lack thereof of the data you used to prove or disapprove a hypothesis. You may be asked to compare data to make assumptions and conclusions to answer your research question.

Methods you may use include cross-tabulation and regression and it may be useful to use software like MS Excel, IBM SPSS, and STATA to assist. 

What is a Data Analysis? 

Data Analysis is "the process for inspecting, cleaning, transforming, and modeling data with the objective of discovering useful information, arriving at conclusion, and supporting the decision making process... There are multiple facets and approaches with diverse techniques for the data analysis. The data analysis in statistics is generally divided in descriptive statistics, exploratory data analysis (EDA), and confirmatory data analysis (CDA)." (PAT Research 2019)

Data  should be cleaned, with outliers and incorrect or unwanted information removed prior to the analysis. 

Using Software like MS Excel, SPSS, and STATA can be used to create the analysis.

PAT Research 2019. (https://www.predictiveanalyticstoday.com/data-analysis/)

Need more break down on what is involved in the analysis? Visit the PAT Research Website. 

Writing the Methods

In this section of your paper, you will describe what methods you are doing to address your research questions and answer your hypotheses. You will address each method taken step-by-step. Your writing sound repetitive. 

After you complete your methods, you will have graphs, charts, and/or tables that you will analyze in the results section of your paper. Your graphs, tables, and charts will either be included in the body of the paper or in as appendices after your references.  

Writing the Results

In this section of your paper, you will provide a narrative of the result of your methods. This will include providing narratives about the significance of the data as well as providing final percentages and other numerical values that the tables produced. You will write a well written paragraph for each table or a group of related tables. You will address how the data proved or disproved your hypotheses (remember a disproved hypotheses is not wrong) and make final statements about the data used.

Further, you should connect your data to your literature review--does the literature support your findings? Why or why not?--as well as make inferences on any discrepancies between them. It may be worthwhile to suggest additional methods that could be used to either clarify or change the results. 

 Again, these should be written step-by-step, and your writing sound repetitive. 

Writing the Limitations

The limitations section may not be required by your professor for this assignment, but most professionals include them before writing the conclusion. The limitations section is an acknowledgements of the limitations of the literature review and methods. It is an opportunity for you to make suggestions on how someone else may improve the work you have done or what needs to be addressed in the field for the work to have impact. This section is usually one to two paragraphs. 

The Conclusion

The conclusion is a summary of the theory, hypotheses, methods, data, and results. This section is usually two or more paragraphs.