Mastering qualitative research methods
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Interview
Political scientists often apply qualitative methods, such as case studies, interviews, and analysis of documents and materials, in an attempt to solve real-life problems. But the world is a very complex system that presents a multitude of challenges for researchers trying to understand it. Andrew Bennett, Professor of Government at Georgetown University, talks about challenges faced in conducting qualitative research and gives advice on how to use qualitative research methods more effectively.
Interview
Political scientists often apply qualitative methods, such as case studies, interviews, and analysis of documents and materials, in an attempt to solve real-life problems. But the world is a very complex system that presents a multitude of challenges for researchers trying to understand it. Andrew Bennett, Professor of Government at Georgetown University, talks about challenges faced in conducting qualitative research and gives advice on how to use qualitative research methods more effectively.
Interviewee: Andrew Bennett, Professor of Government, Georgetown University, President and co-founder of the Consortium on Qualitative Research Methods
Interviewer: Maria Prosviryakova, RIAC
What challenges do political scientists face when conducting qualitative research?
Well, I think that the first and most important challenge is being able to gain the kind of evidence the qualitative research requires:
- to be able to get access to archives;
- to get documents declassified;
- to arrange interviews which includes getting people to talk to you, as well as getting them to be frank, honest, and open, when you interview them;
Professor of Government,
Georgetown University
So, the qualitative research needs a lot of information about what happened and why people do what they do. And that requires getting really close to the evidence which is partly the biggest challenge.
The other challenge is when you are trying to do most similar case studies.
This is kind of analogue to experiment where you are trying to find two cases that are very similar in all of their independent variables, except for one, and that have different outcomes. You compare those and you look at the processes to see if the one variable that differs accounts for the difference in the outcome. The challenge for that is that you never find cases that are perfectly matched. We are looking at cases that occur in the world instead of experiments where we can try to control for everything except for one variable. So, there are always other variables that differ between real cases and then you have to decide if it is those other differences that might explain the outcome and not the difference that you are interested in. So, that is the challenge.
More generally, the world doesn’t always give you the variety of cases that you would want to be able to look at to study any phenomena, because you can’t control the world. It is the distinction between the observational studies where you are observing what happened in the world versus experimental studies where you can set up the experiment, change the world and then see what happens. We, political scientists, do not have that opportunity.
Due to a large number of ethnic and civil conflicts raging around the world, a lot of research is dedicated to conflict analysis and resolution. What qualitative methods are most effective for analysis of conflicts?
Of course, both quantitative methods (e.g. statistical analysis) and qualitative methods (e.g. case studies) have contributed a lot to the studying and understanding of conflicts, particularly to the study of ethnic and civil conflicts during the last two decades. And I think the particular contribution that qualitative methods made in this case is that a number of people (e.g. Jeremy Weinstein at Stanford, Stathis Kalyvas and Elisabeth Wood at Yale) have been doing very detailed research with interviews, archives, field research to get very close to phenomena, to understand in detail how and why people behave the way they do in the ethnic and civil conflicts.
This can be challenging especially if you are trying to study ethnic and civil conflicts as they are happening, because it can be very dangerous to do some of the field work. There is a whole generation of younger researchers that are getting out there and learning the languages, making the contacts and studying the conflict in detail. We are learning a great deal about these conflicts from this kind of qualitative research.
What are the challenges of employing mixed research methods, and can, or should, one mix methods?
There are great benefits to using more than one method. If you have some statistical analysis you can find what cases do not fit, then you can do case studies on those to see if it improves the model. Or you can do case studies first and then decide what variables you want to include in your statistical analysis. Each of these methods has its own challenges and limitations. But since there are different challenges and different limits, it is often useful to combine these methods. So, if one method is weak at something and another method is strong at it – then you can get a stronger research overall by combining them.
The problem is that it is very hard to learn and apply one method really well. Sometimes it can be very demanding. But not every research project requires both methods and not every researcher can really learn different methods that are required to make it successful. Sometimes you need to have teams of researchers who are good at different methods to work together on the same problem. Evan Lieberman from Princeton University has a good article (http://www.princeton.edu/~esl/Lieberman%20Nested.pdf) in American Political Science Review about mixed-method research.
What should the researcher pay attention to when interpreting qualitative data?
Well, the standard questions are: who said what to whom with what purpose? So, the WHO challenge is to figure out who said something, did they actually say it, whether it is their own individual opinion.
Then you have to find out WHAT was said, which is often more difficult then you may think. Now more things are recorded, or videotaped, but a lot of stuff is still in private, and you do not know what was said between two actors when they are making a deal behind the scenes.
And then WHOM they are communicating with and what audience they have in mind. When somebody speaks in a public audience they might have a very different agenda as they may be saying things very differently, than if they had a talk in private.
One really interesting study here is by Yuan Foong Khong who looked at the American decisions on the Vietnam war. He compared the private dialogue between decision-makers that was in classified documents of meetings to the public speeches that these people gave; and they are actually pretty similar but there are some important differences. It is important to see how the same person reacts to or speaks of things in different audiences.
And finally, what is their PURPOSE in giving these communications. Because even in private meetings people might be misrepresenting their views to try to negotiate or block , or bargain with other actors. So, even if you are looking at what they said privately in a classified setting, you are not necessarily getting what they actually think. So, you have to think of the reasons that somebody might have for saying certain things. Are they trying to achieve something else or this is something that they actually believe in? These ethnographic issues of interpretation are always a challenge for qualitative research.
How can Russian scholars and students learn more about qualitative research methods?
There are really more opportunities than even before to learn qualitative research methods even at a distance. If your own institution or university does not have a course on such methods, there are lots of courses around the world and lots of information online now on these methods:
- Institute on Qualitative and Multimethod Research (IQMR), Maxwell School, Syracuse University. Each June this Institute brings together around 150 students from around the world to study qualitative methods for two weeks. People can apply directly to go the Institute even if their university or research institution is not a member of the Institute Consortium as we take somewhere between 10-20 students each year from non-sponsoring institutions. People can apply this fall to attend in June 2014. Students are responsible to pay travel expenses to get to the Institute at Syracuse University in New York, but once you get there, the Institute pays for your meals, for your hotel and for classes.
- Institute on Qualitative and Multimethod Research Reading List
- Course Syllabi on Qualitative Methods
- Courses in Europe on Quantitative, Qualitative, and Mixed Methods
So, there are lots of opportunities online as well as courses in Europe and in the United States to come and study qualitative methods.
Professor Bennett, thank you so much for the interview.
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