Methods for Building Better Theories

About

Workshop contents and objectives

How do we craft more interesting and persuasive theories? While young scholars are taught increasingly sophisticated research methods, little attention is paid to how to construct good theories of important social phenomena. As a result, there tends to be a mismatch between very sophisticated research designs and the simple and often common-sense theoretical explanations they are used to analyze. However, compelling theories are required to get published in top research outlets.

Using your own research as the starting point, this hands-on workshop aims to teach participants methods for producing more compelling theories. Through practical exercises and interaction with your own research, the course goes through the key stages in the theorisation process. Theorisation is an iterative process that involves a dialogue between empirics, existing theories, and interesting theoretical explanations. In this course the focus will be on using within-case and cross-case comparative methods to develop better theories that both can provide explanations of both particular cases and more general patterns across cases.

During the course, participants will apply their new skills to your own research to help craft even more interesting theoretical explanations of the phenomena you are interested in. On the completion of the course, participants will be equipped with the necessary skills to engage in better theorisation using case study methods

Workshop design

Each class day will be divided into two main parts. Morning sessions will start with participant presentations based on the previous days work. The session will then introduce the topic of the day, using a combination of lectures and class discussions.

Afternoon sessions (after lunch) will be focused on practical exercises and activities. In many of these exercises you will be asked to use your own research and empirical material. There will also be group exercises where we will unpack published examples, in particular on days 4 and 5.

Detailed lecture plan (daily schedule)

Day 1:
Theorisation and research questions

Day 2:
Casing and conceptualisation

Day 3:
Types of theories and explanations

Day 4:
Theorisation and middle range theories – using case comparisons

Day 5:
Theorisation and generalisation – using cross-case comparisons.

Class materials

All materials will be provided online.

**The Summer School cannot grant credits. We only deliver a Certificate of Participation, i.e. we certify your attendance.**

If you consider using Summer School workshops to obtain credits (ECTS), you will have to investigate at your home institution (contact the person/institute responsible for your degree) to find out whether they recognise the Summer School, how many credits can be earned from a workshop/course with roughly 35 hours of teaching, no graded work, and no exams.

Make sure to investigate this matter before registering if this is important to you

Course leader

Derek Beach is a professor of Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark

Target group

Graduate students, doctoral researchers, early career researchers

Prerequisites

The course is designed for participants who are at least midway through their doctoral research, meaning that you have a research topic and have engaged in at least some preliminary empirical work. The course is also open to more senior scholars (postdoc) who have a research project that they can utilise in the course.

Fee info