Research Design and Practice: Principles and Concrete Steps for Building your Research

The purpose of this 2-day intensive course is to walk participants through all the main, generic steps of a robust social scientific research design. The course focuses in particular on three main aspects:  

1. How to conduct some upstream and over-arching preparatory steps: how to explore a given empirical phenomenon of interest? How to make an exploratory literature search? How to define one’s epistemological position? How to formulate a preliminary and then a more consolidated research question? How to rigorously formulate hypotheses (if applicable)? How to decide on the balance between theory and empirics?  

2. How to make an informed choice between at least 4 potential ‘families’ of research designs and attached methods: ‘quantitative’ (variable-oriented), ‘qualitative’ (case-oriented and/or interpretivist), ‘comparative’ and ‘mixed methods/multi-method’? How to choose between a simple design or a more ambitious or complex one (e.g. mixed- or multimethod)? 

3. Based on the two above aspects: how to produce one’s own bird’s eye view of one’s whole research design, i.e. a first visual/sequential representation of the whole research process? How to plan ahead in terms of main phases? To what extent should the research be conceived as clearly sequential or more open-ended? How to anticipate risks in order to avoid or mitigate them? 

The course alternates lectures and more interactive sessions, based on the participants’ own (draft) research projects.   

Dates

The course will take place in person at the GIGA Hamburg on 28th (2pm - 6pm) and 29th (9am - 4pm) November 2022 (hybrid option depending on demand).

About the lecturer 

Benoît Rihoux is a professor in political science at the UCLouvain, Belgium. He plays a lead role in the development and diffusion of comparative methods, in particular Configurational Comparative Methods (CCMs) and Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). He is engaged in disciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary projects in diverse fields involving mixed- and multimethod designs. He coordinates COMPASSS, the globalCCMs network, and is joint Academic Coordinator of the Methods Excellence Network, a global pluralist network of social science methods experts. He has taught CCMs, comparative research designs, research designs and research ‘soft skills’ in multiple settings across the globe. Contact: [email protected]  

*Please note that the registration period has closed.