About us
Welcome to the pages of the Chair of Sociology, especially Social Research Methods.
Welcome to the website of the Chair of Sociology, in particular Social Research Methods. We teach in the department’s Bachelor and Master programmes and in the Faculty’s Graduate school.
The methods of empirical social research provide the basis for the systematic recording, evaluation and interpretation of social facts. They serve to answer both application-related and theoretical questions. One focus of the professorship is on researching social inequality from a comparative welfare state perspective, for example employment or education. The empirical basis for this is usually the application of quantitative methods on complex social science data sources such as the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) or the European Social Survey (ESS). In methodology, general principles and quantitative methods are taught.
Both in the area of data collection and data analysis, emphasis is placed on integrating the application of the respective methods into the courses as early as possible in the course.