Theoretical and Empirical Research Methodology
Fall semester 2026
📑 The course in brief
Focus: This is the course website for the module Theoretical and Empirical Research Methodology in the Master International Management Studies at the Europa-Universität Flensburg. The module has two complementary parts that share a single examination:
- the main lecture (Mondays), which introduces the theoretical and methodological foundations of empirical research — from logic and argumentation, over qualitative methods such as interviews and case studies, to quantitative tools such as regression analysis and experiments;
- the implementation lab (Fridays), which puts these concepts into practice by teaching you the statistical programming language R and how to implement the essential research tools discussed in the lecture.
This website hosts the material for both parts so that lecture and lab are easy to navigate together.
How: The course comprises a mixture of (i) lectures, in which concepts are introduced in the classroom, (ii) on-site and video labs for the practical R work, (iii) automated hands-on exercises for you to do at home, and (iv) instructional videos for topics that are best learned by yourself. You are always invited to post your questions to the course forum on Moodle, and more intricate problems can be solved in class.
Prerequisites: The lab does not require you to have any prior knowledge in R or any other programming language. Depending on your prior knowledge or affinity to programming, the course will be quite demanding, but it equips you with computational skills that are most valuable both within academia and the business world.
🎯 Learning Objectives
In the implementation lab you will learn to:
- Use R together with the integrated development environment R Studio
- Understand the use of R packages to perform specific data analytic tasks
- Write reproducible data analysis reports using Quarto
- Transform raw data into tidy data, which is suitable for further analysis
- Choose and justify the correct visualization approach, and create appealing visualizations using the R package
ggplot2 - Implement and interpret linear regression models with numerical and categorial variables
- Analyze experimental data in R
The main lecture complements these practical skills with the conceptual and methodological foundations needed to design, conduct and critically assess empirical research.