Methods Can be Murder: A Metaphorical Framework for Teaching Research Design

Abstract

This article offers two novel tools for teaching political science methodology and research design. The first is a comprehensive framework for helping students conceptualize a research project in political science. The second is a reformulation of the dominant conceptualization of process-tracing tests. Building on Collier’s use of Sherlock Holmes stories to teach process tracing tracing and Kollars and Rosen’s employment of murder mystery party games in research methods courses, both the comprehensive framework and the reconceptualization of process-tracing are framed around the metaphor of a murder investigation and trial, specifically on the model of the plot to an episode of Law and Order. By drawing on pulp depictions of criminal procedure, students conceptualize research projects as analogous to a murder investigation, from the discovery of a body all the way through securing a conviction at trial. This framework draws upon innovative practices of extended simulations and pedagogical scaffolding, with the goal of fostering a creative and collaborative environment for developing undergraduate research projects and gaining mastery over methodological concepts.

Keywords:

• Undergraduate education
• undergraduate research
• methodology
• process tracing
• popular culture

Notes

1 This article is focused on undergraduate teaching, but could prove useful in graduate instruction as well.

2 I utilize Law & Order conscious of the danger of perpetuating misconceptions about criminal justice in the U.S and work to ensure students understand our framework is based on highly fictionalized pictures of criminal procedure. Empirical research on the so-called “CSI Effect” has been mixed (Podlas 2006), but many remain concerned about the effects of mass-media on public perceptions of criminal justice (Simon 1991; Cole 2015).

3 There is nothing groundbreaking about using metaphors in classroom instruction, and the employment of murder mystery tropes is well-trod territory (Ward and Orbell 1988; Collier 2011; Kollars and Rosen 2017). It is the use of these in a comprehensive framework that makes for a truly novel contribution to the pedagogical literature.

4 In Baranowski and Weir’s (2015) analysis of 27 articles outlining simulations published in JPSE, not a single one involved a methods course.

5 This set of images was crafted in the context of the murder mystery framework, but it is intended to be helpful whether or not one employs the larger framework.

6 As King, Keohane, and Verba (1995) note, even the best students have a troubling tendency to propose “impossible fieldwork to answer unanswerable questions.”

7 The frustrations are thus also comparable. Undergraduates may desire to break the mold, but one must understand the rules before breaking them. We all want to be David Simon and write The Wire, but we start with Dick Wolf, or at least Homicide (Simon 1991).

8 I have found Steven Van Evera’s (1997) Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science, to be highly useful. It is a short, accessible text that introduces key concepts and efficiently outlines the process of developing and completing a major research project, but there is nothing about it that makes it necessarily superior to other comparable methods texts. Your favorite methods text can certainly play the same role.

9 I owe this insight to Daniel Kryder, who consistently reminded our graduate research methods seminar Brandeis University that Sherlock Holmes always started with a dead body, and to think of our research projects as similarly beginning with a tangible problem in the world.

10 These likely do not exhaust the list of essential elements, but they indicate aspects of a good research topic in a way that provides a clear starting point. King, Keohane, and Verba (1994, 15) outline the same basic components in two rather than four criteria: “First, a research project should pose a question that is ‘important’ in the real world […]Second, a research project should make a specific contribution to an identifiable scholarly literature by increasing our collective ability to construct verified scientific explanations of some aspect of the world”.

11 This is particularly important for undergraduate students. Professional scholars are free to lose themselves in hypotheticals and marginalia (or in hypothetical marginalia, even!)

12 For the uninitiated: Jerry Orbach played Homicide Detective Lenny Briscoe on Law & Order, whereas Mariska Hargitay played Detective Oliva Benson of the Special Victims Unit on Law & Order: SVU.

13 Because I have found this exercise effective, I have not attempted to nail down one authoritative interpretation of the “suspect.” If an instructor prefers not to use this exercise, they may simply choose one among the various conceptualizations for the purpose of their course.

14 That definition comes from Van Evera (1997), whose conceptualization I find clarifying, but some students have reported finding it vague and frustratingly at odds with their common understandings of what a theory is and does.

15 One commenter on an earlier draft suggested getting IRB approval may be analogous to securing a warrant from a judge, which I thought was a great suggestion.

16 The scene tells the story of a man who tries to commit suicide by jumping from the roof of his apartment building, only to be accidentally shot—before falling into a net which would have broken his fall—by his own mother, who was using the gun to threaten his father. She thought the gun was unloaded, but the son had loaded it secretly in hopes that his parents would kill each other. The mother is charged with murder, with the son as an accessory.

17 Van Evera (1997) does not explain the origin of the metaphors. They are also not explained in texts that would seem to promise such clarifications, such as Mahoney’s (2012) “The Logic of Process Tracing Tests in the Social Sciences” and Bennett and Checkel’s (2014) Process Tracing: From Metaphor to Analytic Tool. Perhaps my students and I are the only ones perplexed, but I doubt it.

18 For a visual representation comparable to Collier (2011).

19 For this point, studying Kuhn (1962) is more helpful than trying to explain things in terms of a jury trial, since a “scientific revolution” sounds like a good thing and an “overturned conviction” sounds bad.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Timothy Wyman McCarty

Timothy Wyman McCarty is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of San Diego. He primarily teaches political theory and his research focuses on democratic theory, theories of complicity and moral responsibility, right-wing radicalism, the politics of taxation, and politics and literature.