Political Science Research Methods

create a question have the literature review be based off the question How to treat your sources in order to squeeze the relevant info and write your LR? (Adapted from your Workbook, Mycoff, Jason D. 2019. Working with Political Science Research Methods – Problems and Exercises, 5th ed. Washington, D.C.: Sage/CQ Press Collect scholarly articles that address the research question’s content Start organizing your articles for your literature review by taking notes on each resource, for instance, in a table. Your table will include notes on each of your sources. Notice that each cell includes important information about one article. Each cell will include (among others): the parenthetical citation in bold to identify the article, notes about the article’s title the research question the time period studied the unit of analysis and sample size of the study, the jurisdiction (state, county, state, country, world region, world. other?) of interest whether the study took a quantitative or qualitative approach (how scholars have made empirical observations) the research design the article’s conclusion. 4. Answer the questions by comparing and contrasting the notes on the sources against each other: Based on your notes above, what are the questions that are asked and answered in the literature, and what questions seem to have been ignored so far? Which periods have scholars studied? Why? How relevant is it? What’s missing? Which jurisdictions have been on the radar of scholars? Why? How relevant is it? What’s missing? Which research designs were used by the research teams to study the topic at hand? Here an example from the Workbook as we will discuss the methodology in class next week: “Scholars have used different research designs to observe and analyze national and subnational variation in the causes of political violence. While many have used cross-sectional analyses (Eck 2014; Fox 2004; Muller 1985; Fearon and Laitin 2003), cross-sectional time series analyses (Pearce 2005), or fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (Ida 2015) to understand national variation in the causes of political violence, other scholars have used case studies (Homer-Dixon 1994; Welsh 2016) to analyze subnational variation.” Points of agreement: What are the conclusions shared by more than one scholar? Points of disagreement: What are the conclusions that run counter to another conclusion? 5. After you have answered the questions , consider how you could combine the sentences you wrote into a literature review. Finally, you’ll add (see the doc A Guide to Writing Literature Reviews in Political Science and Public Administration Department of Political Science UNC Charlotte, 2006): what parts of all the info found are most valuable and important how future research could be conducted to have the most substantial influence on the field.