Environmental Behavior and Decision-making is considered from different perspectives (psychological approaches, evolutionary biology, game theory, and political sciences). The course is focusing ascending levels of human regulatory systems (individuals, groups, organizations) in contexts of forest & landscape management and other environmentally relevant areas.

The course teaches multivariate statistical methods such as linear regression, logistic and probit regression, analysis of variance, cluster analysis, and factor analysis.

The students develop research projects on climate change adaptation in which they combine and apply quantitative and qualitative methods for data collection and analysis. The students identify political, economically and socially acceptable adaptation measures and thus also evaluate the social and ethical dimensions of climate risk analysis and adaptation.

This course provides an introduction to psychological research and modelling, focusing on cognitive psychology and the psychological experiment. Participants learn to formulate problems for psychological investigation and apply basic forms of psychological experiment.

Introductory lecture and exercise to social scientific research methods: Critically evaluate scientific literature, how to formulate research problems and conceptualise research designs, interview technology, qualitative content analysis, and questionnaire construction.

Supplementation of the methodology of sociological research with emphasis in quantitative data analysis: Data screening, descriptive statistics, hypothesis testing, correlations, and writing a research report.