Research design in comparative politics
Prerequisiti
Eligible:
All phd students, all years (from 1 to 4°)
Not allievi corso ordinario
Programma
The aim is to provide a common space to the PhD students of the first three years, working on contentious comparative politics (but also on political communication and cultural studies), to present and discuss the development of their thesis projects to an audience made of professors, post-doctoral fellows as well as of their peers. Besides improving reciprocal knowledge and potential networking, the research design course aims at discussing, with reference to the specific projects, the main steps in the development of a research design: from the selection of the central research questions, to their theoretical framing, the case selection, the choice of the empirical methods of investigation, the challenges of fieldwork, and the analysis and presentation of the results. Involving participants at different stages of their academic experiences, the seminar also offers the opportunity to develop PhD’s skills in not only discussing, but also constructively contributing to each other research, both during the sessions and in successive informal, face-to-face or small groups, occasions, that are in part already ongoing and that we hope to stimulate further.
Obiettivi formativi
Course format:
The seminar has a crash course format and is organized into two full-day meeting according to the schedule provided below. Each student will be assigned two discussants and all participants are welcome to comment orally and in written form. Each student is assigned 60 minutes which are approximately divided as follows: 20 minutes for a structured Power Point presentation of the research project; 20 minutes to the discussants (7-8 minutes per discussant plus the time allocated for the presenter’s response); and 20 minutes for further comments from the audience.
Students are asked to circulate the following type of documents: first-year PhD students upload the research proposal; second- and third-year PhD students upload a chapter in progress of the dissertation or a dissertation-related article plus a five-page summary of the research project. All PhD supervisees are asked to participate (along with fourth-year PhD students). In order to allow all participants to read each project, PhD students are asked to upload their materials in Google drive 10 days in advance of each session.
Riferimenti bibliografici
The Strategy of Paired Comparison: Toward a Theory of Practice by Sidney Tarrow, in Comparative Political Studies, 2010 43: 230, DOI: 10.1177/0010414009350044, The online version of this article can be found at: http://cps.sagepub.com/content/43/2/230
Collier, David; Laporte, Jody; Seawright, J., 2008/01/01, Typologies: Forming Concepts and Creating Categorical Variables, DO - 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199286546.003.0007, The Oxford Handbook of Political Methodology
American Political Science Review, Vol. 98, No. 2 May2004, What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good for? by JOHN GERRING Boston University
Snow, D. A. 2013. “Case Studies and Social Movements.” In The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, edited by D. A. Snow, D. della Porta, B. Klandermans, and D. McAdam, 1–4. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.
The Electoral Success of the Radical Left: Explaining the Least Likely Case of the Communist Party in Graz, 2017, Government and Opposition 54(1):1-22 , by Manès Weisskircher
Piccio, D. R., & Mattoni, A. (2019). Ethics in Political Science Research. In R. Iphofen (Ed.), Handbook of Research Ethics and Scientific Integrity (pp. 1–15). Springer International Publishing.
van den Scott, L.-J. K. (2019). Sociology and Ethics. In R. Iphofen (Ed.), Handbook of Research Ethics , and Scientific Integrity (pp. 1–15). Springer International Publishing.
‘Getting Stuck, Writing Badly, and Other Curious Impressions: Doctoral Writing and Imposter Feelings’, by Brittany Amell (chapter 16) and ‘Surviving and Thriving: Doing a Doctorate as a Way of Healing Imposter Syndrome’, by Margaret J. Robertson (chapter 17), in The Palgrave Handbook of Imposter Syndrome in Higher Education, Edited by Michelle Addison/ Maddie Breeze · Yvette Taylor, Palgrave, 2022, 8-3-030-86570-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86570-2