Course overview
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Nadia's Wednesday, Two Ways

9 lessons · 25 prompts

A day in the life of a Social Scientist: what changes with these prompts.

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Nadia, a social scientist at a small housing policy nonprofit.

Nadia starts Wednesday with two deadlines: a tenant survey draft and a policy brief for a city meeting. She opens ChatGPT and uses the Literature And Theory prompt to get oriented in recent work on housing instability and social ties. She asks for three competing explanations and a short list of sources to check herself.

Before lunch, she moves to the Survey And Instrument Design lesson in Claude. She pastes her draft items about rent, repairs, and neighbor contact, then asks for a bias check on wording. Claude flags one item that sounds like it blames tenants, so she rewrites it and sends the survey to her colleague.

In the afternoon, she opens Gemini for the Qualitative Analysis lesson. She has transcripts from six tenant interviews, and she uses the coding prompt to sort early themes about repair delays and communication. She reads every quote, renames two themes, and keeps her own notes beside the AI output.

By four, she uses the Presenting Findings prompt in ChatGPT to turn the themes into a one-page policy brief for city staff. She edits the language, checks the quotes against transcripts, and sends it. Because the drafting went faster, she leaves on time, walks to the community garden, and cooks dinner without opening her laptop again.

Before

  • Deadlines stack up faster than drafts.
  • Too many PDFs, too little thinking time.
  • Survey wording worries keep me up.
  • Grant forms eat entire afternoons.

After this course

  • First drafts arrive before the coffee cools.
  • More time for fieldwork and careful reading.
  • Policy briefs leave the desk on time.
  • Evenings belong to me again.

What you'll learn

  • Research Design Basics: Turn a rough interest into a workable study plan with help on the question, method, and sampling.
  • Literature And Theory: Get oriented in an unfamiliar literature and assemble a framework section without drowning in PDFs.
  • Survey And Instrument Design: Write better survey items faster and get a bias check on your wording before you field the instrument.
  • Interview Preparation: Build interview guides, rehearse probing, and write recruitment and consent text people understand.
  • Qualitative Analysis: Speed up coding and theme building while keeping your own interpretive judgment in charge.
  • Quantitative Analysis: Get help reading statistical output, checking test choices, and explaining methods to non-specialists.
  • Writing And Paperwork: Move from results to a submittable manuscript and handle grants and ethics forms faster.
  • Presenting Findings: Translate results into a talk, a policy brief, or a plain-language summary for non-researchers.

How this course works

  1. 9 lessonsOne task of your job each, from research design basics to grants and ethics paperwork.
  2. Ready-to-paste promptsCopy, fill in the parts in {{brackets}}, paste into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini.
  3. Tick and completeTick the prompts you tried and mark each lesson complete.
  4. Get certifiedFinish and keep the prompts as your own library.