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The Winter School office is on the ground floor, room FMA/00.08, Feldkirchenstraße 21.
Please note when you register on arrival you will need to pay a €15 deposit for an ID card which allows you to purchase food from the Mensa, printing and copying, library books, internet access and computer login. This is refundable anytime after you have finished using the card but by 16:00 Friday 20 February at the latest.
Social events: Full details are on Bamberg's Virtual Campus. To pre-register please email petra.fischer@stud.uni-bamberg.de
Note from the Academic Convenors
The purpose of the Academic Plenary Programme is to provide methodological ‘experiences’ alongside the course(s) you are attending. The ECPR Methods School not only strives to offer excellent training through specialised courses; it also aims to facilitate methodological cross-fertilisation and debates and to contribute to career and skill building. Do take advantage of these ‘side dishes’ besides your course(s)!
Profs. Benoît Rihoux, Derek Beach and Bernhard Kittel
| Thursday 12 February | |
| 14:00-18:00 | Registration Preparatory courses: Main entrance, ground floor foyer, main building. |
| Friday 13 February | |
| 09:00-13:00 | Registration Preparatory courses: Main entrance, ground floor foyer, main building. |
| 13:00-15:00 15.30-17.00 |
Preparatory Courses (3.5 hours): Main building. |
| 21:00 | Social event: Café Luitpold |
| Saturday 14 February | |
| 09:30-14:30 | Registration Preparatory courses: Main entrance, ground floor foyer, main building. |
| 09.30-11.30 12.30-14.30 |
Preparatory Courses (4 hours): Main building. |
| 19:00 | Social event: Bamberg 'Nachtwächter' tour - A guided tour with a nightwatchman to mystic places for anecdotes and short stories. |
| Sunday 15 February | |
| 11:00-16:00 | Excursion to Reckendorf “Altweibermühle”: A carnival which takes place every 10 years. |
| 10:00-16:30 | Registration Main courses: Main entrance, ground floor foyer, main building. |
| 17:05-1820 | Welcome Plenary Session: Audimax, room F21/01.57, first floor, main building.
Welcome Addresses and Course Introductions |
| 18:30-19:25 | Course Taster Sessions The ‘Course Taster’ sessions cover four courses from the broad Winter School programme. The instructor of each course presents a short 25 minute lecture on their course topic. This enables you to get a clearer picture of the core assumptions, goals and ‘toolbox’ within each course. There are two successive sessions, with two parallel course tasters per session, with five minutes between each session to switch location if you wish to do so. |
| 18:30-18:55 | Course Taster Session 1A: Room F21/01.35 first floor, main building. 'Writing ethnographic and other qualitative-interpretive research: Learning inductively' by Dvora Yanow (Wageningen University). Ethnographic and other forms of interpretive-qualitative research call for a particular ‘genre’ of academic writing. As with all forms of research, it has its own particular challenges. What are the structure and components of published empirical research of these sorts, and how do these publications convince readers of the trustworthiness of the research they report? Through the examination of a selection of articles published in leading journals, we will seek to answer these questions, demonstrating the 'scientific' character of interpretive-qualitative research when ‘appropriately’ written (i.e., drawing on and presenting methods that meet the standards of that epistemic methodological community, in a transparent fashion). |
| 18:30-18:55 | Course Taster Session 1B: Room F21/01.37, first floor, main building. 'Experimental Methods', by Wolfgang Luhan (Ruhr-University Bochum). What are the main methods and techniques of experimental empirical research? Which theoretical knowledge does one need to find a research question, to deduce hypotheses and to design an experiment? Which skills are required to gather, analyse and interpret experimental data obtained in laboratory and the field? This short ‘taster’ session will provide an introduction to the various aspects of the rich toolbox of experimental designs. Some ‘live’ demonstrations will also be used. |
| 19:00-19:25 | Course Taster Session 2A: Room F21/01.37 'Introduction to Bayesian Inference' by Susumu Shikano (University of Konstanz). Political and social scientists increasingly apply the Bayesian approach to diverse kinds of research topics. To many students and junior researchers, however, the Bayesian approach still seems rather mysterious. What are Bayesian statistics all about? What makes them different from ‘conventional statistics’? What could motivate political and social scientists to opt for Bayesian analysis? How does Markov-Chain-Monte-Carlo enable you to conduct Bayesian inference? |
| 19:00-19:25 | Course Taster Session 2B: Room F21/01.35, first floor, main building. 'Focus Groups - From Qualitative Data Generation to Analysis' by Virginie Van Ingelgom (University of Louvain – UCL). Focus groups have become quite fashionable in social science, over the last decade, notably because of the richness of discourse and interactions that they give access to. But the method is more demanding than usually expected. Using focus groups not only requires more resources than other qualitative methods; it also implies to make a large series of decisions concerning the different technical aspects involved, from design and organisation to analysis. What is the variety of focus groups’ uses, in terms of epistemology and research topics? What are the main challenges in designing and conducting focus groups? What are the most appropriate methods to then exploit the data produced through focus groups, and what differentiates these data from interview data, in particular? |
| 19:30 | Welcome reception and refreshments: First floor foyer, main building. |
Monday 16 - 20 February |
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| 09:00-12:30 14:00-17:30 |
Main courses: Main building. Refer to the Academic Timetable and Room Key for room numbers, location and exact teaching times but generally courses are taught either morning or afternoon. Please note some courses require you to work from your own laptops as lecture rooms do not include computers. Please check with your Instructor. |
| Monday 16 February | |
| 08:00-09:00 | Late registration Main courses: Main entrance, ground floor foyer, main building. |
| 10:00 | Social event: Bamburg 6-hills bus tour. |
| Evening | Social event: Club night, live music, DJs and 50% off all drinks. |
| Tuesday 17 February | |
| 12:45-13:45 | Brown Bag Lunch Sessions These are free lunch-time sessions, consisting of presentations by experts in ‘hot’ methodological topics, followed by an open debate. You can also pre-order a lunch bag for €4.50 to be delivered to the session. Lunches can be ordered and paid for at the Winter School office before 10:30 Monday 16 February. NB: Places are first come first served on a pre-registration basis. Session 1 maximum 122 places and session 2 maximum 100 places. To pre-register a place. please email bplant@ecpr.eu. Brown Bag Session 1: Room F21/01.35, first floor, main building. 'Speaking of Quality: Shared Standards for ‘Good’ Qualitative Research?' Topic: 'Trust, but verify' is a quote from a recent article by Andrew Moravcsik on research transparency in qualitative methods (broadly understood), where he contends that qualitative methods need to exhibit the same transparency throughout the research process as quantitative methods on questions such as describing openly the procedures used to collect and analyse data in enough detail to enable other scholars to assess one's claims, and potentially even replicate. An initiative from the American Political Science Association titled DA-RT (Data Access - Research Transparency) has made similar claims, attempting to build consensus around a set of common standards for sharing data and providing information about how knowledge claims were derived. This brown bag session debates the questions of 1) Is the situation really as bad as Moravcsik and others claim? and 2) If so, does it make sense to work towards a set of common standards for all social science methods regarding data access and research transparency? Speakers: Diana Kapiszewski (Georgetown University), Robert Adcock (George Washington University), and Carsten Schneider (Central European University) |
| Evening | Social event: Bar Aposto, great cocktails and food including a cocktail happy hour. |
| Wednesday 18 February | |
| 19:00 | Social event: Bamberg 'Nachtwächter' tour - A guided tour with a nightwatchman to mystic places for anecdotes and short stories. |
| 21:00 | Social event: Café Luitpold, a cosy, early 19th Century cafe with great variety of drinks and food including cocktail happy hour. |
| Thursday 19 February | |
| 17:30-19:00 | Skills Building Session: Audimax, room F21/01.57, first floor, main building. 'Methods Skills - A Key Resource on the Job Market?' An increasing proportion of advanced students and junior researchers, Ph.D. researchers in particular, are developing sharp methods skills. On the one hand, they see this as a way to improve the quality of their ongoing research project(s). On the other hand, they see this as a way to enrich their CV beyond their thematic or disciplinary skills, in the hope that this will be useful for CV- and career-building. Is it so that methods skills constitute a key resource to get more senior jobs, in particular after a Ph.D? Is it the case both on the academic and non-academic job markets? Speakers: Heike Klüver (University of Bamberg), Thomas Saalfeld (University of Bamberg), [3rd name TBC – employer in the private sector] Moderator: Benoît Rihoux |
| 19:00 | Social event: 'Bamberg und sein flüssiges Brot” tour (Bamberg and its liquid bread!). A tour to the old breweries and the history of the long beer tradition in Bamberg. Followed by a beer in one of the main breweries (optional). |
| Friday 20 February | |
| 16:00 | Deadline for ID card refunds from WS office |
| 18:00 | Close of Winter School office |
| 21:00 | Social event: Goodbye pub crawl |
| Saturday 21 February | |
| 10:00-15:00 | Social event: Excursion to Nuremberg including a visit to the 'Memorium Nuremberg Trials' exhibition. |
Updated 28.01.15