Content

The course consists of the following sessions:

Start weekend research master: Introduction to the Research Master as well as to the different courses, including ‘Individual Research Training’. During the start weekend there will also be a session on 'How to do a literature review', which focuses on understanding the purpose of a literature review, its structure and the criteria used to evaluate the literature review.

Searching for literature in electronic (inter)national databases: This session focuses on learning to search electronic (international) databases at the library, judging the reliability of websites/sources and the difference between books and journals. Moreover, a number of open access sources such as SSRN, blogs and google scholar will be explained.

How to write an abstract: In this session you will learn the purpose of an abstract, how it is structered and written and the criteria used to evaluate an abstract.

Assessment criteria for evaluating a research proposal: Based on knowledge acquired in the preceding session of ‘Methods of Legal Research’, this session focuses on how the research proposal will be evaluated by possible reviewers.

Research Questions: This session will focus on the application of the theoretical insights on research questions to your own research by means of examples, group work and individual assignments. You will practice with showing the relevance and originality of your own research and with classifying your research ideas into the different types of legal research. Most importantly, you will practice with formulating good research questions.

Progress of topic exploration: This session will help making you reflect on your topic exploration so far, especially on the two topics of your literature reviews. It will also force you to make first decisions about the remainder of the year; the topic to choose for the research proposal and why.

Doctrinal methods in your research: This session will make you reflect about and practice with doctrinal methods in your research proposal. You are introduced to the most common methods and approaches for conducting traditional legal research. The link between research question and research method will be heavily stressed and also so known methodological pitfalls will be discussed. Finally this session will underline that every research is in need of an own methodology as every research is unique (depending its central and sub research questions).

Content Analysis and Coding Texts: In this session, you will learn to work with social science methods of textual analysis. This includes a training on coding text with software and identifying major themes.

Practical challenges of social science methods: In this session, you are introduced to the challenges of using social science methods for your research. You will learn the do's and don'ts when conducting empirical research and will practice with applying the basic concepts of empirical research on a specific research problem.

Presentation skills: This session aims to teach you the skills to present your research (project). It will also concentrate on how to answer questions concerning your research (project).

Feedback and peer review session on draft Research Proposal: After presenting your draft Research Proposal, you will get feedback from the teachers as well as from your peers. This should help you to improve your final Research Proposal.

Course material

The course material consists of a syllabus given to you at the beginning of the course, a reader with texts produced by the teachers and a number of literature sources, such as books and articles. These will be provided to you by the teachers.