The Empirical Research Cycle: Full course for PhD candidates

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Practical information

You will work on designing your own research project from the specific perspective of empirical research. PhD researchers who are not planning to conduct empirical research in their own project can use the course to explore the possibility of adding an empirical component to their project without conducting the empirical research, while PhD researchers who are already planning to conduct empirical research can use the course to take their research design to a higher level. As such, the course aims to provide participants with an in-depth introduction to this type of research and to assist them in making decisions about setting up empirical legal research.

The course will be concentrated over a period of over a period of one week, with a follow-up day in the next week. This allows researchers from other universities to participate in the course by staying overnight in Rotterdam. The course consists of six lessons of three hours each and assignments before and during the lessons. Some compulsory reading is also part of the course. Participants are expected to have read all the compulsory reading before the course starts and to be available for the whole day on the course days (to attend classes and work on assignments).

At the beginning of the course, participants are expected to have a preliminary idea for an empirical legal study that they would like to work on during the course. This can be an idea for a study that they want to do themselves, or an idea for a study that they are working on for the purposes of this course only. The idea must consist of an external (e.g. criminological, sociological, economic, psychological) perspective on the law and a methodology commonly used in social sciences (e.g. survey, experiment, ethnography). At the end of the course, participants will have to develop and present a proposal for empirical legal research. The assignments that participants will complete during the course will provide the building blocks for their research proposal.

Learning goals

After the course, participants:

• understand how legal research and empirical legal research compare,
• understand what the structure of the empirical research process entails,
• master the basics of how to execute parts of the empirical research process (i.e., formulating a relevant research question, choosing a research strategy, devising a sampling strategy, validating theoretical concepts, theorizing about the relations between concepts, analyzing quantitative data and analyzing qualitative data),
• know how to write a design for an empirical legal research.

Programme

Before embarking on empirical legal research, it is important to reflect on how it compares to legal scholarship. Therefore, the first class starts by comparing legal research with empirical legal research. After accentuating the differences between both types of research, the differences will be nuanced. This is followed by a clarification of the universal structure of the empirical research process, that applies to all empirical research. The first class ends with different ways to come up with an academically relevant research question.

The second class starts with the validation of theoretical concepts. Validity is achieved when the scores derived from particular indicators can be meaningfully interpreted in terms of the theoretical concept that the indicators attempt to operationalize. Validation includes the tasks of conceptualization, operationalization, and scoring. Furthermore, the task of theorizing – coming up with the best possible potential answer to a research question by predicting how the key concepts are related – will be dealt with.

The third class starts with the topic of choosing a research strategy. Different research strategies for empirical legal research – experiment, survey, field study and desk research – will be discussed and how to choose between them. Subsequently, the topic of sampling will be addressed. Sampling concerns the general problem of selecting research units from a larger population with a view to drawing inferences about the full population’s characteristics on the basis of the sample’s characteristics.

The fourth class addresses the topic of quantitative analysis. It deals with choosing the appropriate technique for each level of measurement, elaboration and testing conceptual models.

The fifth class covers the topic of qualitative analysis. It deals with the coding and interpretation of qualitative data. Three different ways of analyzing qualitative data will be discussed: content analysis, thematic analysis and grounded theory.

Dates of the classes

1. 3 Feb: Comparing legal and empirical legal research, Defining the structure of the empirical research process, Coming up with a relevant research question
2. 4 Feb: Validating theoretical concepts, Theorizing
3. 5 Feb: Choosing a research strategy, Sampling
4. 6 Feb: Quantitative analysis
5. 7 Feb: Qualitative analysis
6. 17 Feb: Presentation and discussion research designs

Method: Qualitative\quantitative

Level: Basic/medium

Registration: If you are not a PhD candidate with the Erasmus Graduate School of Law (EGSL), please send an email to  egsl@law.eur.nl to register.

ELS Academy’s No-Show Policy:

Please note that the workshops are given by experts in the field who do this on a voluntary basis. Places are often limited and we have people on the waiting list. For this reason, the ELS Academy has a strict no-show policy. In case you are prevented from attending the workshop, kindly send an email to contact@elsacademy.nl at least 48 hours before the workshop to make space for people on the waiting list.

If you do not attend the workshop without prior cancellation, your supervisor will be informed about your no-show and you will not be able to register for another ELS Academy event for the next two months. This is also very unfortunate for us, however, it can be prevented if we receive a simple cancellation via e-mail.

Thank you for understanding and see you there!