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.

MRes Political Science Stream B (compulsory); other PhD students with permission of class teacher and 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, in order to provide a powerful resource for students to evaluate qualitative methods for themselves, and to select, reject, and deploy them in research theory, 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 studies, qualitative comparative analysis, questionnaires, interviews, reading texts, and ethnography.

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).