This Research Master prepares you to become the researcher of the future: creative, critical, conscientious and at the cutting-edge. You will learn to use a mixed methods approach including the latest computational social science techniques to analyse and help solve tomorrow’s societal problems.
In this Master's programme, you will use computational social science to analyse complex challenges in digital society, such as diversity and inclusion, polarization, fake news, cybersecurity, governance of algorithms and artificial intelligence, and challenges in care and welfare.
In this small-scale programme, you will have a high degree of autonomy to create your own scholarly identity; you can come up with your own ideas, which contribute to your independence and personal development. Moreover, when following this programme, you will be part of our faculty’s research community. You will receive a lot of personal attention from the teaching staff and have real input on the programme. This Master's the ideal preparation for a research career in data-intensive organisations, also outside academia. You will gain practical experience through a full-time internship in an organisation or academic department. Students have interned at organisations like the Red Cross, United Nations, Kantar, and Accenture and academic departments at for example Penn State University in the USA. In addition, the alumni and research staff of VU Amsterdam has strong ties to societal stakeholders, which can boost your career.
You will master a variety of data analysis methods, such as digital ethnography, advanced data mining algorithms, scraping tools to collect data, qualitative and computational text analysis, and online network analysis. At the same time, you’ll develop communication, self-reflection and project management skills to be able to collaborate in multi-disciplinary teams, all of which will be highly valuable in the job market. Each thematic course is co-taught by senior social scientists from different backgrounds.
This Research Master offers you a unique proposition: while other computational social science programmes focus more on data methods, this Master's applies these methods to real-world problems with real-world organizations.
The start date of this Research Master is 1 September.
