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

The first three chapters mirror the teaching days: describing the sample (Day 1), linear regression with interaction effects (Day 2), and non-linear models — logistic regression (Day 3). Two follow-on chapters extend these tools to country effects (fixed effects and multilevel models) and survey weighting, and an appendix documents the data.
Every exercise includes tidy, commented R code using the bundled ess.csv file and its HTML codebook (ESS-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.