This seminar that starts in the Fall semester and will go on in the Spring semester enables students to design and conduct their own empirical research projects. It provides the necessary foundations and facilitating conditions for writing a method paper (Methodenseminararbeit), an empirical paper (Masterseminararbeit) or the master thesis (Masterarbeit). It introduces into the basic ingredients of a research design, discusses into core methods of qualitative studies (namely variants of case study design and variants of content and discourse analysis), and guides students step by step through the development of a research paper. To that end, the lecturers will provide helpful advice for each step of a research process, including:

-    formulating a precise and focused research question,

-    scrutinizing the state of the art in order to deduce hypotheses or other expectations,

-    describing the applied method as tool for a systematic approach towards the empirical material,

-    justifying the selection and definition of cases or empirical material

-    collecting/generating and analyzing/interpreting data, and

-    answering the research question and reflecting on the wider implications of the findings.

In the Fall term, the lecturers will provide core insights on these issues based on text books and their own experiences. The students will discuss published articles that apply these research designs and methods. Furthermore, they will sketch first own research designs for both families of qualitative research. In addition, they will formulate an abstract in which they scrutinize the research design of their own individual project.

At the beginning of the Spring term, the students present and discuss the research designs of their individual research projects and at the end of the Spring Semester, they present their finalized research projects. In the Spring Semester, the course takes place as a block course with a block at the beginning and a block at the end of the semester.