This course will introduce students to research methods used for investigating planning issues and planning methods that are useful in the process of plan-making. Course topics include quantitative research design, research process, and basic methods of analysis including inferential statistics. The later part of the course includes some descriptive and analytical methods that describe existing demographic and economic conditions of communities and forecast change. This course will enable students to pursue independent research for their MUP final projects as well as provide basic research tools for conducting planning analyses. To achieve this goal, we will use programs such as Microsoft Excel and SPSS to analyze data and generate results with statistical techniques and demographic and economic analyses. Students will apply these methods learned from Tuesday lectures to empirical data during weekly labs held on Thursdays throughout the semester. Students will be required to hand in short memos/reports based on their lab work.

Labs:  Thursdays 8:00AM – 9:20AM OR 11:00AM – 12:20PM (106 Hayes Hall)