In class on Feb. 16 Dr. Mislan skyped in to give us a presentation on case study methodology. I’ve been struggling a little bit with my plan for doing a process trace, because I couldn’t really justify its internal or external validity, and I couldn’t come up with a causal mechanism, because the components of durable peace agreements interact with each other rather than cause each other. Dr. Mislan described a different kind of case study methodology, called structured, focused case comparison (SFCC), which is a lot more generalizable than process-tracing. It also is a little simpler than process tracing, which will make it a little easier for me to make the project really strong. I feel a lot better about doing SFCC than I did about doing process tracing.
SIS Olson Scholars