Week 02 · August 31–September 2
Build an evidence base.
Turn a broad environmental-policy concern into a tractable research question, then distinguish the evidence needed to study adoption, outcomes, and policy design.
Mon & Wed · 12:30–1:45 PM South 227B
Note
Office hours: Mondays and Wednesdays, 1:45–3:15 PM, in South 227B—immediately after class.
This week
Evidence and claims
- Separate technical potential, observed adoption, and policy outcomes.
- Match each proposed claim to an appropriate unit of observation.
- Identify what the available data cannot establish.
Data transformation
- Use a transparent dplyr pipeline to inspect, transform, and audit a table.
- Preserve the meaning of rows, missing values, and denominators.
- Record decisions that affect the interpretation of results.
Solar adoption
- Frame solar adoption as a household, firm, or institutional decision.
- Connect mechanisms such as incentives, costs, and constraints to variables.
- Choose one bounded contribution to the shared research project.
Before class
- Review your Question + Data Scan from Week 1.
- Bring one source from the literature or a public agency that helps define your policy problem.
- Reopen the greenhouse-gas data pipeline and note one decision that requires justification.
Lecture slides
Classwork
Classwork 1: Build and Audit a Greenhouse-Gas Change Pipeline
Use the classwork to practice keeping the research question, the pipeline, and the resulting claim aligned.
By the end of Week 2
Prepare a short evidence memo containing:
- one refined research question;
- two relevant literature or policy sources and the contribution of each;
- one proposed empirical claim and the variables needed to examine it; and
- one limitation that would change how the claim should be interpreted.
This is a formative working artifact that prepares the research-design work to come.