HKU Moodle

This course focuses on interdisciplinary research in social sciences, psychology, economics, and sociology involving social networks, mobile phone data, mobility data, digital trace data, and other field data that lend to behavioural data analytical approaches.  In addition to studying the literature, this seminar teaches research craft, including identifying interesting research questions, co-developing conceptual frameworks and empirical paradigms, and arbitraging cutting edge technological and methodological developments into impactful publications in your subfield. Class activities will include lectures (for basic methods, e.g., quasi-experiments, network analysis), student presentations, and discussion. We will discuss 4-6 articles or book chapters in depth each lesson; I provide an extensive list of additional readings for optional self-study. Throughout this course, students should aim to develop a novel idea based on ideas or methods from this class. 

This seminar course requires extensive reading across different disciplines, creative and adaptive thinking (often in unfamiliar domains), and active participation. You are expected to attend all sessions of the course and to complete readings assigned for discussion in each session, prior to attending the class. For each article, students should consider the stated objective and positioning of the research, conceptual framework, methodology and models, the results, the actual contribution (relative to the state of the art), and the opportunities for further research in that area.