First Summer School on Quantitative Methods
May 29 to June 2, 2022
The Arab Political Science Network (APSN) in collaboration with the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies (DI) organized an inaugural Summer School on Quantitative Methods virtually via ZOOM, from May 29 to June 2, 2022. The school was led by Abdelkarim Amengay and Ammar Shamaileh, and brought together over 13 researchers and postgraduates from Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia, and Lebanon. The five-day program focused on providing participants with foundational knowledge on the use of quantitative empirical methods and training in descriptive and inferential statistical applications using RStudio and SPSS.
Abdelkarim Amengay, assistant professor at DI, provided an overview of the summer school program and its objectives, and focused in the first session on best approaches to develop a research design. In the second session led by Ibrahim Khatib, assistant professor at DI, he shared his experience and best practices on designing and fielding surveys. The third session led by Ammar Shamaileh, assistant professor at DI, gave an overview on “Math Foundations: Essentials for Political and Social Research,” which he continued to explore in other sessions throughout the program. All the sessions offered interactive discussions with the participants, and opportunities to engage questions related to their research projects and how to benefit from the school’s outputs to develop their research methods and ideas.
On the second day, Dr. Mohammad Almasri, Executive Director of the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, presented the work and data from the Arab Opinion Index, which is an annual survey conducted by the Center about the Arab World. The day ended with a session on Statistical Applications: Measures of Central Tendency and Distributions, presented by Abdelkarim Amengay, which showed the fellows how to read and understand statistics.
The participants were divided into two groups on the third day to begin training on the use of statistical programs - RStudio and SPSS. Each group worked closely with an instructor for at least an hour and a half every day. The remainder of the program included sessions dealing with various topics, such as the logic of statistical inference and hypothesis testing.
The final session of the program summarized key points and concepts discussed throughout the 15 sessions of the summer school. The lecturers thanked the participants for their engagement and hard work during the five days. They encouraged them to continuously seek new opportunities to learn and hone their quantitative methods skills, which would help create a new generation of political science researchers specializing in quantitative methods in the Arab world.
