Course Syllabus

V491: Honors Research in Public and Environmental Affairs

O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs

Indiana University-Bloomington

Fall 2026

**Draft and subject to revision until Week 1 of class**

Tuesday and Thursday, 9:35 AM–10:50 AM

SPEA (PV) 275

 Prof. Allison Schnable

 

Overview

This course is the first of a two-semester sequence to train students in researching and writing a senior honors thesis. V491 focuses on the design of public/environmental affairs research, while V499 focuses on research writing.  We will discuss the genre of the undergraduate thesis, how to identify research question, the elements of research design, and the essentials of different research methods. By the end the semester, students will have completed a research proposal for their honors theses.

 

Course readings and roughly half of the lectures are devoted to helping you understand the principles of research design.   The other half of class time and the course exercises ask you to apply the principles of research design to your honors thesis. This pivot—from understanding the principles to applying them to your own work—is one of the key challenges of the course, and is part of moving from a “consumer” to a “producer” of knowledge.

 

Course objectives

By the end of this course, you will:

  • Understand how to construct different types of research designs and evaluate strengths and limitations of each approach.
  • Distinguish between causality and correlation and be able to construct a narrative about relationships.
  • Consider ethical implications of research and know the basic principles for doing research ethically.
  • Be able to
    • Narrow a topic to a specific research question.
    • Define or conceptualize key terms.
    • Conduct a literature review on a particular topic.
    • Identify sources of data.
    • Select sources of data that are appropriate to answering a research question.
    • Make use of research tools available on campus and online, including academic publication databases.
    • Write a research proposal.
  • Begin collecting data so you have some analysis done at the start of the V499.

 

By the end of the course, you will have identified a faculty advisor for your thesis and will have written a complete research proposal.

 

Texts

The required text for this course is Political Science Research Methods—8th Edition, by Janet Buttolph Johnson, HT Reynolds, and Jason D. Mycoff (ISBN 978-1-5063-0782-4).  (Note that you may purchase the newer 9th edition, but it will be more expensive and the page assignments will be off.) I strongly encourage you to buy or rent the paper text—very inexpensive versions are available through Amazon. All other readings will be available as PDFs on Canvas.