[MUSIC] Hello and welcome to the second week of the MOOC on Studying Cities, Social Science Methods for Urban Research. My name is Jan Fransen and I'm the Deputy Director of the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies of the University of Notre Dame. I have a masters and a PhD in development studies. Over the past three decades, I have worked in the exciting fields of urban economic development. I have studied urban employment creation, urban poverty, small firm development and community participation in over 25 countries in Europe, Asia and Africa. I also worked for the International Labor Office in Kenya and Zimbabwe during the 1990s. As a researcher and lecturer, I have supervised many students in their successful graduation and I've been second reader of even more. I have seen the successes, the mistakes, the frustrations, the tears, the laughter and the victories. I will use this countless and precious experiences in guiding you. I assume that you have participated in the first week and that I can congratulate you with the fact that you are now able to define a problem statement, a research objective and a research question. During this exciting week, you will learn how to prepare theoretical framework and how to operationalize your research. Within the next weeks, you will move to the next steps, identifying your research strategy, data collection and data analysis. I will present four more videos this week. And each video introduces a crucial step in turning your research question into a full flitch research proposal. The next video of this week will enable you to prepare a literature review. In the second video, I will show you how to write a chapter on the existing theories on your research topic. It ensures that you can benefit from the immense and valuable academic work of other schoolers before you. In the third video this week, I will discuss how to develop concepts. You'll learn how to identify, define and sharpen the main terms that you want to use in your own research. And in the fourth video, I will assist you to use the concepts in order to develop a conceptual framework. In this video, you will learn how to identify the relationships between the concepts that you want to study. This demarcates your study and it identifies the different types of causal effects that you can study. Finally, the fifth and last video of this week enables you to operationalize your concepts. It will show you how to develop variables and indicators and how to measure these indicators. After this step, your research proposals suddenly feels and looks more concrete, and you have successfully identified what exactly you want to measure and observe. I will use a range of examples drawn from the thesis of my students and from my own research, and these examples range from slum upgrading in Vietnam, bicycle transport in Israel, to small firm development in Indonesia. Besides the videos, there are also additional experiences shared, assignments and readings. Personally, I really like doing research, as it helps me to understand cities, its multiple opportunities and challenges. I am excited about this week. So let's get started with the literature review in the next video. [MUSIC]