Comparative area studies:methodological rationales and cross-regional applications

Link:
Beteiligte Personen:
  • Ahram, A.I.
  • Köllner, Patrick
  • Sil, R.
Verlag/Körperschaft:
Oxford Univ. Press
Erscheinungsjahr:
2018
Medientyp:
Text
Schlagworte:
  • Analysis
  • Qualitative comparative analysis
  • Fuzzy-set qualitative
  • Party
  • Election
  • Voter
  • Context
  • Qualitative research
  • World region
  • Small-n comparison
  • Cross-regional comparison
  • Area studies
  • Comparative method
  • Comparative area studies
  • Middle-range theory
  • Research methods
  • Analysis
  • Qualitative comparative analysis
  • Fuzzy-set qualitative
  • Party
  • Election
  • Voter
Beschreibung:
  • Area studies scholarship has been indispensable for the development of social scientific knowledge. However, it risks becoming marginalized without more concerted efforts to demonstrate its relevance for contemporary social science. This volume showcases comparative area studies (CAS). CAS incorporates familiar elements from past comparative research but draws them together into a strategy for balancing context-sensitive understandings of diverse locales with cross-regional qualitative research on questions that matter to social science disciplines. Part II considers the epistemological, methodological, and practical concerns driving CAS as well as the pitfalls of doing cross-regional comparative research. The chapters emphasize the distinctive gains from extending one’s field of vision beyond one’s primary area of expertise (and the costs of not doing so). Part III presents studies that illustrate how creatively designed contextualized comparisons of cases from different regions generate novel insights into a range of substantive topics–from protests and rebellions to anti-corruption campaigns, resource booms, and the organization of production. The final chapter recasts the significance of CAS in light of current debates on social science methods, suggesting that cross-regional contextualized comparison can partly compensate for some of the blind spots in the most common forms of qualitative and mixed-method research. The volume demonstrates that the pursuit of area expertise and the search for social scientific knowledge need not be a zero-sum game as long as we make conscious efforts to connect scholarly debates unfolding within separate area studies communities to each other and to the theoretical problems driving social science research.
Lizenz:
  • info:eu-repo/semantics/closedAccess
Quellsystem:
Forschungsinformationssystem der UHH

Interne Metadaten
Quelldatensatz
oai:www.edit.fis.uni-hamburg.de:publications/be8e4464-f30d-4e9d-bb84-75933bafc468