My second meeting with Dr. Zhang took place on February 19, 2018 from 12:15 to about 12:45 (so about 20 min in length). Our conversation mostly addressed my anxieties about the current form of my research question, and so the internal (and also external) validity of drawing any conclusions to answer it. I explained to Dr. Zhang that I had come to a sort of crossroads — a dilemma about the trajectory of my research — and was considering moving antiforeign protest from the dependent variable of my research project to the independent variable of my project. Instead of testing for causes of protests, I would be testing for the cause of the diplomatic concessions made after (and hypothetically in response to) the nationalist protests.
I also explained that after Professor Mislan’s workshop, I was feeling slightly more confident about the state of my project and possibly saw a way forward in structured, focused comparison. His explanation of structured, focused comparison acted as a nice counterweight to the emphasis that others (especially in our readings from last semester) had given to process tracing. The “structured” and “focused” nature of this methodology is very useful to me as it entails testing for the presence (or degree of presence) of variables at different stages of the given process rather than placing as much emphasis on directly approaching or observing the causal mechanisms at play (though these two sides of case study research are not completely mutually exclusive — indeed, process tracing is probably the most powerful form of within-case analysis).
He replied that I certainly still could change my research question at this point, but shifting nationalist demonstrations from the dependent variable to the independent variable would be a complete break from my work up to this point — my literature review would probably consist of social movements research, rather than research on protest and crisis bargaining. He also expressed that my research was doable in its current form. I do not have the resources, time, or experience that Weiss had when she did her research on Chinese nationalist protest, but I can still test for external effects of government decision-making and do meaningful research — even if I cannot necessarily directly observe the decision-making process. Since then, I have decided not to change my research project and instead to dedicate myself to work on structured, focused comparison.