Dr Steffen Hertog CON4.01

This course is available on the MRes Political Science. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

Other PhD students must request permission from the class teacher, which is routinely granted subject to capacity.

This course introduces and critically evaluates, at the advanced postgraduate level, a key range of qualitative techniques and methods in political science. It aims to build students' capability to evaluate such methods and to select, reject, and deploy them in research design and practice.

The course begins with debates over the place of qualitative methods in political science, and the question of how to match ideas to methods. The rest of the course is devoted to exploring a range of qualitative techniques, including case selection, case studies and process tracing, comparisons, interviews and field research, qualitative comparative analysis, and "mixed methods". The content of each week will be integrated as closely as possible with participants' own research projects (even if qualitative work constitutes only a small part thereof). The course is relevant for political scientists, but also students of development and international relations.

20 hours of seminars in the LT.

Critiques of articles or books that use the various methodologies discussed in the course.

G. King, R. Keohane, and S. Verba, Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific inference in qualitative research (Princeton, 1994). Antoinette Burton ed., Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Duke University Press, 2006). Paul Rabinow, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco, first published 1977 (University of California Press, 2007); David Collier and Henry Brady, Rethinking Social Inquiry (Rowman and Littlefield 2010); John Gerring, Case Study Research: Principles and Practices (Cambridge University Press 2007).

Essay (30%, 1500 words) in the LT.
Project (70%, 2500 words) in the ST.

EITHER (1a) A thorough critique of an article which uses one of the methods discussed in the course (1500 words) OR (1b) A short project using one of the methods discussed in the course, focused on how to analyse and present qualitative findings (e.g. a short content analysis, a set of interviews around a particular topic, etc) (1500 words) AND FOR ALL STUDENTS (2) A complete "mock" research design, preferably (although not necessarily) on their own research question (2500 words).