For nearly a decade we at the University of Auckland's COMPASS research centre have used a hands-on, laboratory-based, computer-assisted skills course in quantitative methods to expose students to some basic analytical and computational techniques. But do we risk pitching such a course purely as the acquisition of skills without connection to wider substantive and theoretical issues of the parent discipline?

We have required students taking our course to draw on data from a suite of electoral and attitude surveys going back at least a decade, using SPSS to carry out basic descriptive and analytical tasks. However, we have also asked them to organise their work around a guiding research question using items from these surveys. In this paper I will share some of the best student work from this course, showing that honours-level students in politics can indeed draw up meaningful research questions and come to interesting (if preliminary) substantive conclusions that emerge from their empirical work - even within the confines of a six-week skills course.