Here is the link to my final research design presentation, thank you so much for watching!
5 Replies to “Final Research Presentation”
Julia — I find your topic to be very interesting, and I thought your presentation was clear and well-organized. I have a couple of questions about some of the things you have mentioned in it. You have talked about an array of intervening variables that, apart from women participation in peace negotiation, influence the durability and success of peace agreements. You have also mentioned that different combinations of them can be either sufficient or necessary for an agreement to succeed. Since there are so many of intervening variables, and each of them represents a complex concept or process that, in turn, influences other variables, I was wondering if you had any causal mechanism in mind to represent how do your independent and intervening variables come together to produce your dependent variable. I know you have talked about their combinations, but I wonder about the relationships between each other as well.
You also discuss how your cases are very much similar in their success, durability, and other characteristics. So, you have two cases with every circumstance in common besides one – women inclusion. It sounds more like Mill’s Method of Difference, not Agreement, but please correct me if I am misunderstanding something. Overall, I really enjoyed your presentation, and I am looking forward to seeing how will your project develop in the future!
Julia!
Great presentation! It was very clear, you did a very good job of outlining and highlighting your main points. Your powerpoint itself was very well put together and concise. Good outline of your puzzle and how you have discovered this through the literature. Clear operationalization of your variables and what questions you will be asking. Show your causal model! Very clear hypotheses. Is your time frame from when these peace agreements were created until today? Overall though, good case selection, you did a good job tying it to your literature. You were very clear in how you intend to perform this research. Good analysis of your tradeoffs and justification and how your project ties into other established literature. Try relating your project to the class materials as well! What about how you are ensuring validity, reliability, and falsifiability? How will you go on with this project in the future?
Really good presentation!!
Julia,
I enjoyed listening to your presentation. I think that the puzzle that you are investigating is very interesting and pertinent to current events (peace agreements will hopefully, at some point, be negotiated in places like Ukraine, Syria and Yemen).
Going forward into 306 I have a couple of suggestion in regards to your project. The first would be refining your research question. Right now you start off with “generally”, but small-N although seeks some generalizability focuses on particular cases. So, consider thinking about how you would change your research question to fit your specific cases.
Also in your presentation, you didn’t include a section about your literature that you have read and the different schools of thought of various scholars! Once you had laid out your puzzle I was curious to hear about what scholars had said about the subject.
Finally, A variable that you might want to investigate going into next semester; the effect of the conflicts on women. I know that in Bosnia, women suffered greatly during the war. Rape was used in very systematic way as a weapon of war. However, as you pointed out women were not included in the peace process. I am not sure about how women were affected in Northern Ireland, but I think that this is a variable that deserves investigation!
This is a good presentation and you do a very good job explaining for your broad methodological choices and how you hope to leverage the small-n study to gain traction on your particular puzzle and question.
I would push you to do some streamlining of the intervening variables that you have articulated and of the causal mechanisms that you are anticipating and testing here, since I worry too that there is an awful lot going on. This will become easier once you are more directly engaged in the actual study.
I also would like to hear a bit more about your case selection, and one question I have is whether there are any cases where more women were involved in the process than those you have selected? It would be good to hear more about this, even just by way of explanation of your choices.
Julia — you have a good presentation here, and you’ve received great feedback from your peers and from Dr. Field. I would second their suggestions (in particular, it would have been good to show us the causal model!) so be sure to think about the suggestions above as you finalize your Final Narrative Paper and look ahead to SISU-306. I know we’ve talked since your presentation and that you’re not really focusing on a Mill’s Methods comparison any longer, and that’s fine. The logic of comparison that you discuss here isn’t quite Mill’s Method of Agreement (same outcome, same value on key IV) or Difference (different outcomes, different values on the key IV). Regardless of the method, though, it would be good to discuss the specific cases before you delve into variables and hypotheses since case selection (based on theory and methodological choices) is so central to this particular methodology.
Julia — I find your topic to be very interesting, and I thought your presentation was clear and well-organized. I have a couple of questions about some of the things you have mentioned in it. You have talked about an array of intervening variables that, apart from women participation in peace negotiation, influence the durability and success of peace agreements. You have also mentioned that different combinations of them can be either sufficient or necessary for an agreement to succeed. Since there are so many of intervening variables, and each of them represents a complex concept or process that, in turn, influences other variables, I was wondering if you had any causal mechanism in mind to represent how do your independent and intervening variables come together to produce your dependent variable. I know you have talked about their combinations, but I wonder about the relationships between each other as well.
You also discuss how your cases are very much similar in their success, durability, and other characteristics. So, you have two cases with every circumstance in common besides one – women inclusion. It sounds more like Mill’s Method of Difference, not Agreement, but please correct me if I am misunderstanding something. Overall, I really enjoyed your presentation, and I am looking forward to seeing how will your project develop in the future!
Julia!
Great presentation! It was very clear, you did a very good job of outlining and highlighting your main points. Your powerpoint itself was very well put together and concise. Good outline of your puzzle and how you have discovered this through the literature. Clear operationalization of your variables and what questions you will be asking. Show your causal model! Very clear hypotheses. Is your time frame from when these peace agreements were created until today? Overall though, good case selection, you did a good job tying it to your literature. You were very clear in how you intend to perform this research. Good analysis of your tradeoffs and justification and how your project ties into other established literature. Try relating your project to the class materials as well! What about how you are ensuring validity, reliability, and falsifiability? How will you go on with this project in the future?
Really good presentation!!
Julia,
I enjoyed listening to your presentation. I think that the puzzle that you are investigating is very interesting and pertinent to current events (peace agreements will hopefully, at some point, be negotiated in places like Ukraine, Syria and Yemen).
Going forward into 306 I have a couple of suggestion in regards to your project. The first would be refining your research question. Right now you start off with “generally”, but small-N although seeks some generalizability focuses on particular cases. So, consider thinking about how you would change your research question to fit your specific cases.
Also in your presentation, you didn’t include a section about your literature that you have read and the different schools of thought of various scholars! Once you had laid out your puzzle I was curious to hear about what scholars had said about the subject.
Finally, A variable that you might want to investigate going into next semester; the effect of the conflicts on women. I know that in Bosnia, women suffered greatly during the war. Rape was used in very systematic way as a weapon of war. However, as you pointed out women were not included in the peace process. I am not sure about how women were affected in Northern Ireland, but I think that this is a variable that deserves investigation!
Julia:
This is a good presentation and you do a very good job explaining for your broad methodological choices and how you hope to leverage the small-n study to gain traction on your particular puzzle and question.
I would push you to do some streamlining of the intervening variables that you have articulated and of the causal mechanisms that you are anticipating and testing here, since I worry too that there is an awful lot going on. This will become easier once you are more directly engaged in the actual study.
I also would like to hear a bit more about your case selection, and one question I have is whether there are any cases where more women were involved in the process than those you have selected? It would be good to hear more about this, even just by way of explanation of your choices.
Looking forward to reading more, Julia!
Julia — you have a good presentation here, and you’ve received great feedback from your peers and from Dr. Field. I would second their suggestions (in particular, it would have been good to show us the causal model!) so be sure to think about the suggestions above as you finalize your Final Narrative Paper and look ahead to SISU-306. I know we’ve talked since your presentation and that you’re not really focusing on a Mill’s Methods comparison any longer, and that’s fine. The logic of comparison that you discuss here isn’t quite Mill’s Method of Agreement (same outcome, same value on key IV) or Difference (different outcomes, different values on the key IV). Regardless of the method, though, it would be good to discuss the specific cases before you delve into variables and hypotheses since case selection (based on theory and methodological choices) is so central to this particular methodology.