Quantitative Approaches to Data Collection and Analysis

This seminar aims to introduce doctoral students to key elements of qualitative research:

1) its main traditions and paradigms, in particular 'mainstream' qualitative research aiming for theory-testing and by and large grounded in the assumptions of positivism, and interpretive research aiming for an understanding of deeper structures of meaning that shape the social and political world;

2) the specificities, uses and limitations of qualitative research and their implications for the research process and research design;

3) the main approaches to data collection (archival/documentary research, interviewing, ethnography, etc.) and data analysis (qualitative content analysis, possibly discourse analysis), probably with an emphasis on interviewing and content analysis (depending on the participants’ interests though).

The aim of this workshop is twofold: students who do (or consider doing) qualitative research will find some "food for thought" as to how what they do or consider doing fits into the wider universe of research methodology, and what key difficulties they should be prepared to deal with; students who do not work with qualitative methods should acquire a basic "literacy" in qualitative research so as to be able to understand what other researchers do and think about it constructively.

About the lecturer

Lea Sgier is a senior researcher and lecturer at the University of Applied Arts and Sciences (Social Work) and at the Political Science Department of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She is the lead researcher in charge of a National Science Foundation project on dementia policy in Switzerland (PNR74, 2017-2020). She also co-directs a project on elder people’s political citizenship in nursing homes in French speaking Switzerland (Leenaards Foundation, 2017-19) as well as a smaller project on dementia related trainings (for the City of Geneva). A political scientists by training, she was an assistant professor in qualitative methodology at Central European University (CEU) in Budapest from 2010-2017. During this time, she also acted as methodological advisor for two large scientific cooperation projects with the Western Balkans (RRPP Western Balkans) and the South Caucasus (ASCN). She also in an instructor on various methodology summer/winter schools and doctoral programmes (Essex Summer School, ECPR Winter School, WSSR Montreal, SSRM HKU, CUSO Switzerland). Finally, she has been a member of the Steering Committee of the ECPR Standing Group on Political Methodology since 2013 (www.ecpr-methods.org).