CLASS Advanced Methods School Ushers Scholars into a New Era of Research

“In God we trust; all others must bring data.” The words of William Edwards DEMING, a prominent statistician from the last century, reveal the unswerving power of data in the current era. Data narrates the stories of our society, depicting issues and trends for more significant insights.

This feature is equivalent to research methodology, a distinct subfield touching upon computational methods, survey experiments and data science. Meanwhile, human values and behaviours remain to be investigated through other theoretical traditions and methodological approaches, including historical, qualitative and ethnographic methods. Among many scholars and methodologists, the inquiry, “How does data-driven research prevail in liberal arts, humanities and social sciences?” gains much attention.

Gear Up for Advanced Methods
It is critical to address researchers’ surging demand and foster interdisciplinary collaborations in today’s academia. The College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) of CityU has established the CLASS Advanced Methods School (CAMS) as an avenue to equip researchers and students of CLASS and beyond with conceptual and technical competency deemed essential for theoretical and empirical inquiries.

On 6 June 2022, CAMS kickstarted the summer school by organising a keynote speech. Professor Richard M WALKER, Dean of CLASS, outlined CAMS’s background and objectives to expose young researchers and students to various advanced research methods training. Later, Professor Christine HUANG Yi-hui, Associate Dean (Faculty and Research) of CLASS, previewed all 14 CAMS events incorporating three components: research design, method training and practical toolkits with the audience. She then introduced the keynote speaker Professor Pippa NORRIS, a distinguished political scientist at Harvard University who specialises in comparative politics, elections, political culture, gender politics and political communication across the globe.

In What We Trust
In the keynote speech entitled “In Praise of Skepticism: Trust but Verify”, Norris shared her conceptualisation of “trust” and research findings. She started by telling the fable “The Scorpion and the Frog” to illustrate that it is part of human nature to trust others. Trustworthiness, as she sees it, involves an informal social contract where principals authorise others to act on their behalf, expecting the agent to fulfil their responsibilities, despite conditions of risk and uncertainty.

When evaluating the trustworthiness of political institutions, Norris holds that public judgments should reflect the quality of government procedures, like the principles of competency, impartiality and integrity, and institutional guardrails. The theoretical framework presents the benefits and problems of “trust”, and the erroneous beliefs involve both cynical mistrust and credulous trust.

To collect public opinion data, Norris conducted cross-national empirical research by using World Values Survey (WVS)/European Values Survey 7-wave (EVS) between 1981-2021, investigating 115 diverse open and closed societies. WVS-EVS measures interpersonal trust, institutional confidence and trust in global governance.

Norris adopted a three-layered analytical strategy to analyse how subjective perceptions about the quality of governance strengthen confidence in political institutions. Levels of public trust in diverse agents and societies are measured to gauge subjective perceptions and objective indices of agency performance. Such measurement enables a comparison that shows the correlation between public trust and performance. According to the findings, sceptical trust in government is positively linked with a plurality of information and good governance in open societies. In the meantime, cynical mistrust and credulous trust are prevalent in closed societies with poor public administration and limited information access.

The keynote speech was wrapped up with a Q&A session moderated by Dr Edmund CHENG, the Convenor of CAMS and Associate Professor of the Department of Public and International Affairs. Enthusiastic and intrigued, students and scholars from different disciplines and nations had fruitful discussions with the speaker about her theoretical approach, research methodology and how she deals with response bias, geocoding and cross-sectional data.

The Line-Up of Scholastic Excellence
In the subsequent weeks, 13 other scholars from around the world delivered modules, seminars and publication seminars, contributing their discoveries of data-driven methods, processes and tools used in liberal arts and social sciences studies.

Having attracted hundreds of local and global participants, CAMS set forth good examples of scholastic excellence and stimulated insightful ideas on advanced methods of research. It brought together esteemed methodologists worldwide to provide up-to-date, wide-ranging and mixed methods training for faculty members, researchers and students. As they exchanged wisdom and drew on diverse perspectives to solve shared problems, CAMS helped usher in a new era of data-driven research in liberal arts, humanities and social sciences.

Discover more about the upcoming (and past) activities of CAMS:
https://www.cityu.edu.hk/class/research/cams/default.aspx