Final Project Overview

Carolina Torreblanca

University of Pennsylvania

Global Development: Intermediate Topics in Politics, Policy, and Data

PSCI 3200 - Spring 2026

Final Project Overview

Objectives

The final project is the culmination of this course

  • Reflect the substantive knowledge and technical skills that you developed
  • Provide experience
    • Generating a research question
    • Refining into a testable hypothesis
    • Identifying data to provide evidence for or against
    • Communicating the results of your analysis to others

Objectives

  • Help you answer research questions in the future
  • Assess the strength of evidence presented by others
  • Incorporate research into your professional decision-making

Requirements

  • Research project with data of your choosing
    • Formulate a research question
    • Find data that can help you answer that question
    • Apply the tools and methods from this course
    • Write-up analysis
  • Produce a webpage to present your results for public consumption

Write-up

  1. Introduction to research question and data
  2. Discussion of research design, assumptions, and threats to inference
  3. Visualization describing your data
  4. Presentation of results from a regression model and discussion of implications for research question
  5. Robustness test to probe assumptions or empirical extension
  6. Discussion of policy implications
  7. Appendix including supplementary materials

Final Project Touchpoints


Milestone Due Date
Create a GitHub repository Feb 17
Research Question and Data Feb 23
Research Design Mar 5
Submit proposal Apr 2
Submit final project May 10

What Makes a Good Research Question?

Step 1: Find a question


The most important thing about a research question is that it is a question

  • You do not know the answer. You could be wrong
  • Adding a question mark to a topic does not make it a question

Step 1: Find a question

  • “Girls’ education?” – not a question. This is a topic

  • “Is girls’ education important?” – important how? To whom? Compared to what?

  • “Does expanding secondary school access increase women’s labor force participation?”

Step 2: What’s your hypothesis?

You have a question. Now: what do you think the answer is, and why?

  • Engage with what we already know. What has been studied? What do those studies find?
  • Do you have a reason to think the answer might be different in a different place, at a different time, for a different population?

Step 3: Research design

How would you answer this?

  • What is the counterfactual – what are you comparing to what?
  • What data would you need?

Step 4: Is this tractable?

Can you actually do this? Can one person do it in a semester?

  • One outcome
  • One mechanism
  • One context

Let’s build one together

Topic: Climate change

Here are three things we know:

What is a research question here?


Your turn

What is your hypothesis?


Your turn

How would you test it?

If you were god and could run any experiment, what would you do?

Now come back to earth. What data would you need? Does it exist?

Some data that exists

Past Student Projects

Assignment 1: Research Question and Data

Research Question and Data

Must be submitted via Slack by 11:59pm EST on Monday, February 23

  • Sketch a research question that you’d like to investigate
  • Identify data that can answer that question
  • I will provide feedback on the viability of the questions, the suitability of the data, and the extent to which your general idea will meet my expectations

Research Question and Data

Send me a quarto html file that:

  • Briefly describes your idea for a research question
    • 3-4 sentences describing some relationship in the world that you want to investigate
    • This should involve at least two things in the world that can be measured with existing data
    • You may submit more than 1 idea
  • Proposes data and measures that will help you answer it
    • Specific, existing dataset that you can access
    • Specific variables that will be used to answer the research question

Types of data

  • Election returns
  • Replication data
    • Published research from the last 5-10 years should make data publicly available, often on Harvard’s Dataverse

Types of data

  • Survey data
    • Used extremely heavily in the social sciences: Afrobarometer, Latinobarometer, etc.
  • Administrative data
    • Data on government or organization programs

The world is full of data. Look hard. Ask me if you can’t find anything suitable

Assignment 2: Research Design

Research Design

Due March 5

  1. Research question and background (40%): Describe your research question and why it is interesting or important. Incorporate feedback from Assignment 1. Include references to at least two pieces of existing research – academic articles, policy reports, think tank publications (e.g. Brookings, UNHCR), or data journalism. ~150-200 words

  2. Testable hypothesis (25%): State at least one testable hypothesis. Describe a specific relationship you expect to see (i.e. changes in x cause changes in y). Make an argument for why, based on existing research or your own reasoning. ~150-200 words

Research Design

  1. Variables and visualization (25%): Discuss the specific variables and dataset you will use. Mention the data source, unit of analysis, and sample. Create a ggplot to visualize the relationship between your variables. Good options: scatter plots (continuous), grouped bar charts (ordinal/binary), line graphs (time-series)

  2. Regression model (10%): Specify the main regression model you will use to test your hypothesis. Use markdown to render the equation neatly

https://carolina-torreblanca.github.io/psci3200-globaldev-main/