Quantitative Methods for Public Administration – PADM 810

Course Description

The purpose of this course is to present an examination of quantitative methods and designs that are used in the public sector. Areas of focus include measurement, sampling, and design issues in generating and testing research questions and hypotheses. Quasi-experimental and non-experimental designs will be used including survey research to assess public input on government service quality and applied to practice and policy issues. IBM SPSS software will be used to analyze government datasets using descriptive and inferential statistics including correlations, cross-tabulations, t-tests, ANOVA, and regression.

Rationale

Students will learn to apply quantitative methods best practices in a manner applicable to the public administration sector. Ethical and biblical principles will be applied to the management of data and presentation of results.

Course Assignment

Textbook readings and presentations

Course Requirements Checklist

After reading the Syllabus and Student Expectations, the student will complete the related checklist found in the Course Overview.

Discussions (3)

Discussions are collaborative learning experiences. Therefore, the student will take part in 3 Discussions in which he/she will post a thread presenting his/her essay on the assigned topic, writing 750–850 words. Then, the student will post replies of 250–300 words each to 3 classmates’ threads. Each reply must be unique and must cite 2 scholarly sources and cite ideas from the required reading. Merely posting the same reply in 3 places is not sufficient and may be treated as a form of academic misconduct. The original thread must cite 4 scholarly sources and incorporate ideas and citations from all of the required readings and presentations for that module: week. The student can use additional articles as well. All citations must be peer reviewed journal articles, dissertations or textbooks. No encyclopedias, dictionaries, Wikipedia, or website blogs. All posts must comply with APA current edition format.

Quantitative Analysis Report Assignments (5)

This course requires 5 data analysis report assignments. In these assignments, the student will use public administrative datasets provided by the professor and conduct statistical analyses and procedure interpretations. The student will post a report with tables, figures, and text including testing the hypotheses and providing interpretation of the results. The report will be in a Word document, APA current edition format, 12-20 double-spaced pages of content, and supported by at least 10 citations from course readings and presentations as appropriate.