Im writing a political science essay where i need to write a methodologies section. I cannot find what specific methodologies to use, i cannot conduct my own field work so i am reviewing articles around the topic of my essay, as well as policy documents and interviews that other researches have conducted and published in their work.
Dear Hannah,
methodology always depends on what you are trying to analyze, you have to decide according to the researched problem, and your methodology and data should bring some interesting findings. Since you are writing an essay the fact that you are not conducting your own field research is not so limiting, I suppose you are almost completely new to the social science research so an analysis of data created without specific field activity will actually do quite nicely.
First of all, methodology generally consist of two types of methods - for data creation (some people still use collection, but, for various reasons, I don't think it's accurate in qualitative analyses) and for data analysis. You are writing that you would like to analyze some videos and documents so part of your methodology would be a section about what videos and documents were included to the analyzed data corpus. You should write about the issue you are analyzing and why included videos and documents will provide answers to your research questions, also very important part of this section is some kind of restriction - you cannot analyze all the videos and documents. Some time period or specific actors are mostly used as a restriction - you include only videos and documents by defined actors in defined time period. You should also write how did you manage to obtain the included videos and documents, whether they are available in public (that would be your case) or they are non-public and you obtained them through some field work.
If you have data corpus you will need to analyze it somehow so it's time for applying methods for data analysis. Very common and basic is the qualitative content analysis, which consist in observing of argumentation and reasoning (not always but very often) in the corpus and finding some patterns (repetition of arguments, for example) or inconsistencies (one actor uses two arguments which negates themselves in the end). So, in this section, you would write what method do you use and how (mainly what are you focusing on during the analysis of the corpus). An important part of this section is also coding as specific activity for analysing, classification and selection of the data. During coding, researcher assigns codes to passages that have same meaning and they are repeating so that they create some pattern. Coding should be described (what codes were used, how many cycles were used and so on). Since you are writing an essay you will not have to write it so thoroughly but it's good to keep in mind that something like this exists.
I haven't written about another methods for data creation (for example, interviews) and analysis (critical discourse analysis, metaphor analysis or narrative analysis) so take it as very basic introduction to your problem. I would suggest reading some articles from Forum: Qualitative Social Research (http://www.qualitative-research.net/), there are some very useful and practical articles about the possibilities of conducting a social research, including qualitative content analysis, coding, and creation of data corpus out of videos and documents. And, of course, there are plenty of methodological books and articles so you can specifically search for things I wrote about.
Hope, this would be somewhat helpful.
Dear Hannah. You may want to consult the book "designing social inquiry" by Gary King, Robert Keohane and Sidney Verba. This is a very accessible and useful book on designing research in political science.
Dear Hannah. You may want to consult the book "designing social inquiry" by Gary King, Robert Keohane and Sidney Verba. This is a very accessible and useful book on designing research in political science.
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