Still exhausted following last week's final exams, but I figured it was time to get off my butt and post something!
The major project for my graduate seminar in international politics was a research design, or a literature review and proposed hypothesis without actual tests (or as I like to say, "writing a joke with no punchline"). Here's the quick-and-dirty:
Doctors without (Virtual) Borders: Internet Effects on Epistemic Communities
Abstract: Epistemic communities existed long before the widespread adoption of Internet technology in the mid-1990s. However, the Internet offers an array of new opportunities for epistemic communities, particularly non-government organizations (NGOs). The purpose of this research design is to propose a method to compare the effects of Internet use between NGOs founded before widespread Internet adoption, or legacy NGOs, and NGOs founded post-adoption, or transformative NGOs. To build my argument, I first present NGOs and the Internet through the framework of constructivism. I contend that not only do epistemic communities reflect constructivist thought, but that Internet can also be viewed as a physical constructivist structure in both design and use. I then propose a qualitative content analysis research design to analyze two NGOs: Médecins Sans Frontières (legacy) and Team Rubicon (transformative). I expect to find differences between each case based on language content, which should indicate how epistemic communities adapt to the Internet. Download
On the plus side, the design exposed me to a wealth of literature, including analysis techniques, foundational constructivist works, and select NGO operations. The disadvantage of presenting just a research design is the distinct possibility I'll never get around to writing the full paper. Given the USAF has me on a strict timeline (must finish the PhD in 3 years), I try to gear all my research towards my dissertation, which I must finish in a blisteringly fast pace. As of right now, though, I'm not sure where this piece fits. Alas, I don't have time in the near future to finish the paper, let alone the fact I've never conducted an "official" content analysis.
I've done my share of unofficial content analysis: my primary job in the Air Force is to find patterns within diverse sources. That said, its a non-standard methodology, involving a fair share of experience, art and duct tape which varies between projects: in other words, not good for scientific experimentation.
In their classic text Designing Social Inquiry, King Keohane and Verba1 argue that a good theory is falsifiable, concrete, and has observable implications. THe point of content analysis, then, is to standardize observations across documents. Standardization helps make the experiment objective rather than subjective, and also allows other political scientists to replicate the same standards against additional documents and thus verify--or falsify--the design (for those of you not into experimentation, falsifiability is a good thing, as it helps researchers build better experiments). The below article offers a concise description of experimental content analysis:
Mayring, Philipp. “Qualitative Content Analysis.” Forum: Qualitative Social Research 1, No. 2 (2000).
Abstract: The article describes an approach of systematic, rule guided qualitative text analysis, which tries to preserve some methodological strengths of quantitative content analysis and widen them to a concept of qualitative procedure.
First the development of content analysis is delineated and the basic principles are explained (units of analysis, step models, working with categories, validity and reliability). Then the central procedures of qualitative content analysis, inductive development of categories and deductive application of categories, are worked out. The possibilities of computer programs in supporting those qualitative steps of analysis are shown and the possibilities and limits of the approach are discussed.
Available at Forum: Qualitative Social Research
In addition to potentially measuring how the internet helps and/or hinders NGOs, I also want to use the design as a means of measuring information communication technology (ICT) in general. Measuring ICT effects is a tricky endeavor; to wit, while finding global bandwidth data is reasonably easy (World Bank, for example), data on ICT effects on people and processes are harder to find (at least in my experience so far).
As usual, any feedback on my design or advice on researching ICT are most welcome! Leave a comment here or write me at james-at-jdfielder-dot-com.
1King, Gary, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba. 1994. Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
