Comprehensively mapping political science methods: an instructors’ survey

Abstract

A map provides a unique view over the complex relationships of competition and complementarity between methods. It goes beyond the usual approaches to methods, namely monographic, mixed, encyclopaedic and classificatory. A diverse set of 50 social and political science methods instructors were surveyed about their specialty along 17 dimensions that are regarded as contrasting by the methodology literature. Correspondence analysis and cluster analysis were used to reveal response profiles and proximities between courses. Results show that the ‘qualitative/quantitative’ divide appears structuring, but not as much as is often conceived. Quantitative-oriented courses form a rather cohesive cluster whereas qualitative courses display high variability regarding empirical material, scales of observation, techniques and epistemologies. The resulting global picture accounts for more dimensions of the quickly expanding space of methods than usual typologies of methods do. We hope it will stimulate new methodological combinations and new ways of teaching methods.

Keywords:

• Methods
• methods mapping
• methods teaching
• correspondence analysis
• qualitative/quantitative

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank D. Beach, R. Cordenillo, C. Egger, P. T. Jackson, B. Kittel, L. Tonka and the IJSRM anonymous reviewers for their encouragements and suggestions, as well as participants to the workshop ‘Mapping Methods, Mapping Research Traditions’ held at the ECPR General Conference, Bordeaux, September 2013. They are also grateful to the ECPR MS instructors for the time spent on the questionnaire. The survey and the analyses presented here are of the sole responsibility of the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. http://ecpr.eu/Events/EventTypeDetails.aspx?EventTypeID=5.

2. Among the 49 respondents (see Section 4), a sizeable minority have been partly or fully trained in the US; some are currently US-based, and some are US nationals currently affiliated in European universities.

3. Q16 (Epistemology: ‘Could you define in one or a few words the main epistemological position attached to the method taught in your course?’) was kept open so as to catch as much as possible of the diversity of positions. The result was uneven. On one side, a third of the instructors did not reply, either refusing to declare too rigid, general positions, or uncertain about the precise technical term(s) that would fit their research practice. On the other side, the replies collected could be coded into seven quite clear stances (see Appendix 1).

4. For some questions, the ‘predominant view’ will more or less duplicate the respondent’s view; for questions with significant discrepancy between dominant and personal view, the nuance will be taken into account. Note that this is not harming the balance between the 17 questions in the correspondence analysis design, as all of them will have the equal weight of 2.

5. All data and results are available upon request to the corresponding author.

6. Variables, i.e. questions asked to instructors, are in bold characters.