5 nov goals, tools and trade-offs Flashcards
KKV vs BCS, qualitative and quantitative
KKV = King, K and Verba = mainstream ?quantitative? research
BCS =
analysis of one or a few caes contribute to the overaching goals of positivist reasearch (specifically: descriptive and causal inference and concept formation (reconstruction))
we can’t achieve everything with quantititve tools, wualitative tools achieve specific goals that quantitative tools don’t -> a key part of research design is understanding the goal trade-offs inherent specific tools
key terms = overarching goals, intermediate goals, tools
- set relational causation (see reading)
overarching goals vs intermediate goals
- ultimate goals
= higher level purposes of research
- e.g. positivists researchers all want to do descriptive and causal inferences
important for positivist qualitative researchers: “refining theories”: which can also contribute to the overarching goals of descriptive and causal inference
intermediate goals = diff per tradition
- trade-offs: pursuit of one particular objective may make it harder to achieve another -> i can’t achieve everything at the same time
tools
= methods (not methodologies) = practices and procedures for achieving intermediate goals
- trade-offs: no tool can achieve everything
- while a given tool may achieve a particular intermediate goal, it may make it difficult to achieve another one
research design is about
making choices among potentially incompatible goals, or to evaluate these trade-offs in light of alternative goals
critiques and responses 1
book chapter, critiques from quanti to quali
avoid “no variance” designs: do not do one single case study, you must focus on something that varies
problem with this advise:
- gets in the way of doing relevant research -> you limit yourself to questions that can be addressed with statistics (your method informs your question)
- some research practices can improve inference but not necessarily innovation
-> methods should come from RQ, not vice versa
-> horses behind the car: making questions that can be answered with a cross-national regression or with an experimental design, and skewing relevant questions that don’t fit these methods
e.g. studying the causes of one specific war is worth investigating
qualitative practices tend to be conductive to innovative questions and areas of research
- e.g. identifying and studying deviant cases (does not fit what theory says)
- KKV assumes that creativity and theoreteical innovation are only the product of personal genuis or brilliance, they are not (lot of innovation in quant polsci comes from qualitative research)
- suggestion: let your RQ guide your method choice, look for RQ that is puzzling
critiques and responses 2
book chapter, critiques from quanti to quali
conceptualization and measurement: focus research on concepts that maximize measurement validity and reliability, and to avoid organizing data with typologies
-> practice to focus on things that are easy to measure, of which data is available, to focus on ideal types
validity = conceptualization and operationalization
reliability = operationalization and measurement
problem with this critique:
- may turn to invitation to ignore questions involving important questions (normatively and theoretically)
- e.g. civil society, political culture, legitimacy, hegemony
-> methods determine research agendas, not the other way around - typologies, and more generally research on concepts formation, can make important contributions to causal inference, for instance by identifying causal heterogeneity
critiques and responses 3
book chapter, critiques from quanti to quali
selection bias: KKV’s advise was to avoid selecting a set of cases that does not represent the population (which is achieved by a large-enough sample chosen at random)
- cases should be representative sample bc we want to infer to something broader (random selection and large sample)
problem
- purposive sampling (non-random) is not representative BUT has other benefits that can’t be achieved with a large sample of cases
-> representativeness is not the only possible (immediate) research goal
important benefit of quali is rigorous within-case analysis + hypothesis formation or theory refinement, concept formation through a few ases, analyzing cases that are actually comparable, without stretching their comparability through a large sample (e.g. countries within a hisotrical region or subantional cases), comparing cases that are not obviously ‘cases’ (changing the unit of analysis, e.g. historical regions across countries (hard/not to find in datasets)) - represesntative sample depends on how one defines the universes or population of cases
e.g. dataset all countries 1800-2020, it does not need to be a rndom sample bc sample=population
BUT: assumes that countries are perfectly comparable + different cases are perfectly comparable
diff beteween countries, why they differ is in a black box, it is not studied
critiques and responses 4
book chapter, critiques from quanti to quali
advise
models of causation: KKV advise against using deterministic (set-relational) notions of causation on the grounds that the world is probabilistic
problem 1: what about hypotheses and theories formulated int terms of set relations - how are we to evaluate them?
-> these theories often formulated often in comparative historical processes (e.g. state formation)
set-relational causation
correlational vs set-relational causation
- probablistic vs deterministic is a diff distinction
!exam won’t ask about diff with correlational causation
variety of set relations (i.e. set-relational causal relationships):
- sufficiency
- necessity
- necessity and sufficiency
- equifinality
- -
set-relational causation - example democratic peace hypothesis
democracies do not go to war with other democracies = deterministic
dyad = pair of countries
- X is sufficient condition of Y: X->Y
if X then for sure Y (X falls within Y)
of all possible combinations of countries, democratic dyads are a subset of peaceful dyads - X is necessary condition of Y: X<-Y
Y is a subset of X, if you know X, you don’t necessarily know Y
assymetric causation: you can know one side of the arrow, not both - X is necessary and sufficient conditions = X<-> Y
only democratic dyads are peaceful dyads
the two groups of dyads overlap - equifinality = more than one path to the same outcome
either X1 or X2 is individually sufficient for Y (X1 or X2 -> Y), it is not the only condition for finding the outcome, more than one path for peace (e.g. democracy and power asymmetry) - conjunctural causation = two conditions produce the outcome but only if they are together
X1 and X2 are together sufficient for Y (X1 and X2) -> Y - INUS conditions = when there is>1 causal path to the same outcome, each path is a conjuctural cause
IN = conditions in each conjuctural cause are insufficient but necessar for the conjuncture
US = conjunctures are unnecessary (it can also happen through another conjuncture) but sufficient for the outcome
each part of the conjuction are necessary for the conjunction to exist, but they are insufficient
INUS conditions are common in comparative-historical analysis (comparison of historical processes and sequences)
Barrington Moo example - we don’t need to understand SUIN
some tools from the qualitative research tradition
Levy 2008
key concepts
- case study objectives = ideographic, hypothesis generation, hypotehsis testing, plausibility porbe
- …
some tools from the qualitative research tradition
Levy 2008
what is a case study
distinguish from historical studies: social science focus on aspects of reality that relate to a theoretical or policy discussion (you don’t look at the whole phenomenon, you focus)
- historians embrace the richness of reality
a case is often an instance of something else - > “what is this a case of?”
- instance of a class of events, in whide which we analyze in detail certain apsects to develop or test historical explanations that may be generalizable to other events
- !not necessarily
“case” vs “observation”
- one or few casses, but many observations: pieces of data within cases (like in the case study of Florida’s Panhandle)
- case studies are not “narrative” studies: we can use many types of data within the case, including statistics, remember that qualitative methods are not about words
some tools from the qualitative research tradition
Levy 2008
typology of objectives of resaerch
- ideographic
describe, explain, interpret and/or understand a single cases as an end in itself rather than as a vehicle for developing broader theoretical generalization
- inductive = not structured by theoretical framework an concept
- theory-guided …….
some tools from the qualitative research tradition
Levy 2008
typology of objectives of resaerch
- hypothesis-generating
purpose of proposing or refining a theory, for insntance, thorugh the speciffication of causal mechanisms
e.g. Lijphart The Politics of Accommodation: how NL remained stable despite deap divides (pillarization), consociational democracy
some tools from the qualitative research tradition
Levy 2008
typology of objectives of resaerch
- hypothesis testing
some hypotheses can be tested through one or few cases, using process tracing, structured comparisons, crucial cases, etc.
plausibility probe = explanatory case study that highlights elements that will be useful before egnaging in a broader research……………….
