Introduction to Python for Social Scientists

Data Science is the interdisciplinary science of the extraction of interpretable and useful knowledge from potentially large datasets. In contrast to empirical social science, data science methods often serve purposes of exploration and inductive inference.

Course leader

Dr. Arnim Bleier, Indira Sen (GESIS, Germany)

Target group

We offer a starter-level course for Python that provides an introduction to the basics of using the Python programming language for students, researchers or practitioners who want to use Python in their research for tasks in the field of data science. The knowledge obtained in this course provides a starting point for participants to start using Python for exploring and preprocessing data and to perform simple analysis tasks for their own research projects.

Course aim

In this course, we aim to provide a gentle introduction to the Python programming language with a specific emphasis on learning how to work with Python's data science stack. Participants will be provided an introduction to the Python data science stack and Jupyter notebooks, basic concepts of Python, and data exploration and preprocessing with Pandas.