Chapter 1 Preface

Burak Sonmez
University College London

This course is about building strong quantitative social science foundations, so new AI technologies become an asset, not a black box.

This book accompanies the short course RECSM: Quantitative Methods in Social Research. It extends the slide decks with worked examples, code, and practice exercises that use the European Social Survey (ESS) microdata for the United Kingdom (GB), Germany (DE), and France (FR).

How to use this book

Each chapter mirrors a teaching day: descriptive statistics (Day 1), understanding associations (Day 2), nonlinear models and interactions (Day 3).
Every exercise includes tidy, commented R code using the bundled ess.csv file and its HTML codebook (ESS...subset codebook.html).
Required R packages are listed at the start of each chapter; install once and re-use.

If you spot anything unclear or errors, please get in touch with me.