Historical Research

Question 1

Why is temporality important to explain political phenomena?

Answer 1

Temporality refers to context and timming. “In analysis, thinking explicity about timing an sequence, and paying attention to the multiple forms of social time”.

Question 2

Why do IR Researches more and more use historical approaches?

Answer 2

Historical approaches enable us to incorporate a stronger temporal dimensnion into the analysis. Analysis becomes temporal by situating events in their historical and cultural contexts, taking into accunt related series of events that unfold over time, and thinking explicitly about timing and sequence.

Question 3

What two types of temporality are there?

Answer 3

Temporality can be conceive of i terms of:

1) a broad histrorical period (time as context)
2) the sequental active unfolding of social action and events

Question 4

What forms of comperative and historical research are there?

Answer 4

Historical Event Research (One case and one time period)
Historical Process Research (One case / many time periods)
Cross-sectional Comperative Research (Many cases / one time period)
Comperative Historical Analysis (many cases / many time periods)

Question 5

What is the aim of Comperative Historical Analysis (CHA)?

Answer 5

1) the ‘identification of causal configuarations that produce major outcomes of intrests within historically deliminated contexts’
2) historical sequences and ‘the unfolding processes over time’
3) systematic and contextual comparision

Question 6

Which 3 types of CHA are there?

Answer 6

Pararell Demonstration of Theory
Contrast of Contexts
Macro-Causal Anlaysis

Question 7

Why is the form of temporality “time as context” useful?

Answer 7

Contextualizing events enables researchers to identify the causal influence of certain events on others because it helps us to better understand the relationship between those events.

Question 8

Which 2 set of methods and approaches represent the second type of temporality (the sequental active unfolding of social action and events)?

Answer 8

Historical Institutionalism and Event Structure Analysis

Question 9

What is the big difference between Historical Institutionalism and Event Structure Analysis?

Answer 9

Both are concerned with the analysis of temporal processes, but historical institutionalism is concerned more specifying with bringing questions of timing and temporality to the centre of the analysis of institutions.

Question 10

What does critical conjucture mean?

Answer 10

A critical conjucture is an event which sets in motion courses of action that become difficult to reverse.

Question 11

What does positive feedback refer to?

Answer 11

The notion that each step down a particular path reinforces the likelihood that future changes will continue in the same direction because positive gains accure to actors and make them reluctant to swith direction.

Question 12

What does path dependence mean?

Answer 12

The notion that present institutions or cultural forms are cumulative and selectively reproduced products of past social actions, which in turn provide the basis for future action.

Question 13

Which methods do historical institutionalist prefer to establish a causal link between hypothesised causes and outcomes?

Answer 13

Comperative Historical Analysis, or most likely Process Tracing

Question 14

What does the method of process tracing indicate?

Answer 14

It is a method for identifying the causal relationship that connect hypothesized causes and outcomes. It entails carefully tracing the sequence of events constituting a process in order to identify the underlying causal mechanisms that link a varible with an outcome.
It is a good method for exploring the events and mechanisms that consitute path dependence historical research.

Question 15

What is the key component to confirm a hypothesis in process tracing?

Answer 15

It is necissary to adress, or control for, alternative explanations.It has been suggested that researchers employing process tracing should first construct a list of potential alternative explanations.

Question 16

What does ‘genetic determinsism’ refer?

Answer 16

It refers to the assumtion that earlier happenings determine what comes later.

Question 17

What is a primary source?

Answer 17

Materials which are written or collected by actors who actually witnessed the events that they describe. They provide direct or first-hand evidence about an event, object or person, and show minimal or no mediaterm between the document/ artifact and its creator.

Question 18

What is a secondary source?

Answer 18

Materials which are produced some time after an event happened, and so contain information that has been interpreted , commented on, analysed or processes in some way.

Question 19

Why must primary sources be evaluted?

Answer 19

To be able to establish the source’s authncity and the reliability or accurency of the information they contain.

Question 20

How do researchers establish the authencity and reliability of a primary source?

Answer 20

Establishing the authencity of a primary source requrires the researcher to engage in what historians call ‘ external critisism’. External critisism refers to an assessement of the external characteristics of a source, including when, where, by whom, and for whom it was produced.

Researchers must also determine the truthfulness, the accuracy, and evidential worth of a primary source, through what historians call ‘internal critisism’. This requires us to find something about how the authors of the source us related to the subject matter.

Question 21

On what four grounds should a researcher base the evaluation of an online source?

Answer 21

1) Authority
2) Accuracy
3) Accessibility
4) Purpose

Question 22

How can secondary sources be evaluated?

Answer 22

1) It is important to think of different historical accunts, not as offering different sets of facts, but as a series of comperting interpretative narratives which are the focu of scholarly debate.
2) Rather than relaying on a single histrorical accunt, we should consider the accunts of a number of historians who differ methodologically and substantively, and look for an overlap in them.
3) We need to be attentive to the perspectial and theoretical commitments that sources carry, which requires us to know something about the intellectial hertiage and theoretical dispositions assosiated with each scholar.

Question 23

What is confirmatory bias?

Answer 23

Confirmation bias is the tendency of the researcher to limit the search for evidence in secondary sources to only those that provide confirmation for the researcher’s argument.

Question 24

How does confirmatory bias arise?

Answer 24

This type of bias arises when a researcher approaches research as a process of gathering as much evidence as possible to support a particular hypothesis or point of view, and ignores any information that weakns it.