Overall, I think this is a solid research design presentation. I like how your selected your cases and how you operationalized your variables. One recommendation I do have is to make the relationships between the variables that you hypothesized about and outlined in your causal model. For example, I do not fully understand why the Cuban Socialist Ideology was important to the change in External Affairs/Economic Partners. If anything, it seems to me that the Socialist Ideology should probably be a stumbling block for positive economic relations with capitalist economies. I would also perhaps spend more time explicitly explaining why you have selected a case study approach as opposed to a large-n or interpretivist approach. Still, good presentation and I hope you manage to find those elusive Cuban documents!
Luis, good job overall — I liked your critical reflection portion and I think that it is evidence of a strong and thoughtful research design. My only criticism is with your focus; I would have liked your methodology and reflection section to take up more of your time and focus than operationalization and your literature review. The latter two are important to your project, but I don’t think they are the *most* important or interesting decisions you are making. This might be something to think about moving forward with your FNP. One tiny comment: I think that the arrow in your causal model between Economic Depression and External Affairs is pointing the wrong way (I think it was the collapse of the USSR, an external event, that prompted an economic depression in Cuba).
This is an interesting proposal, especially in that you take some of the tools of interpretivist research and apply them to the small-n model.
To start, a small consideration I had is whether the reemergence of diplomatic and commercial relations between the US and Cuba in the past few years is significant enough to warrant ending your last case before that event. However, this might not be a very consequential difference because the amount of data and texts relevant to the past couple of years might be too small anyway.
A challenge I thought of while watching this video, and which you then address at the end, is the reliability of the Cuban government’s justifications for their policies. This is a challenge when analyzing any government, so you are surely not the first one to face it.
I was a little confused by your explanation when you mentioned that you will be assigning different economic strength levels on your own. I’m sure you have some method for that grounded in the research, and the time limit here makes it challenging to detail that. But you could go into more detail there for the final narrative paper. The same comment applies to the classification of Raul and Fidel Castro as an institutionalist and Marxist, respectively.
Luis — you have a good presentation here, and you’ve received some great suggestions from your peers in the comments above (so make sure to take those suggestions into account as you work on your Final Narrative Paper and think about your work in 306). Since you have chosen a small-n methodology I would work on refining the research question so it clearly asks about the specific case outcomes (the values of the DV that you have found) that you propose to explain. This, to me, really seems to be about the overall politics of entrepreneurialism in Cuba (the changes in *policy* as well as in *politics* and rhetoric). I would make that more explicit so we know exactly what you propose to explain from the question and statement of the puzzle. As you work on your operationalization for variables make sure to clearly state the variable in a way that makes it self-evident how that factor could vary (how it could be high/low, present/absent, etc.). Something like “external affairs” isn’t really a variable — what is the thing that is changing that you are trying to capture/measure? Finally, you might think about additional variables (since one of the strengths of the methodology is the ability to capture complex relationships) and, with that, hypotheses that focus on different combinations of causes or sequences of factors in explaining each of your cases. Keep up the reading and research — I look forward to seeing how this develops in the Final Narrative Paper and beyond!
Overall, I think this is a solid research design presentation. I like how your selected your cases and how you operationalized your variables. One recommendation I do have is to make the relationships between the variables that you hypothesized about and outlined in your causal model. For example, I do not fully understand why the Cuban Socialist Ideology was important to the change in External Affairs/Economic Partners. If anything, it seems to me that the Socialist Ideology should probably be a stumbling block for positive economic relations with capitalist economies. I would also perhaps spend more time explicitly explaining why you have selected a case study approach as opposed to a large-n or interpretivist approach. Still, good presentation and I hope you manage to find those elusive Cuban documents!
Luis, good job overall — I liked your critical reflection portion and I think that it is evidence of a strong and thoughtful research design. My only criticism is with your focus; I would have liked your methodology and reflection section to take up more of your time and focus than operationalization and your literature review. The latter two are important to your project, but I don’t think they are the *most* important or interesting decisions you are making. This might be something to think about moving forward with your FNP. One tiny comment: I think that the arrow in your causal model between Economic Depression and External Affairs is pointing the wrong way (I think it was the collapse of the USSR, an external event, that prompted an economic depression in Cuba).
This is an interesting proposal, especially in that you take some of the tools of interpretivist research and apply them to the small-n model.
To start, a small consideration I had is whether the reemergence of diplomatic and commercial relations between the US and Cuba in the past few years is significant enough to warrant ending your last case before that event. However, this might not be a very consequential difference because the amount of data and texts relevant to the past couple of years might be too small anyway.
A challenge I thought of while watching this video, and which you then address at the end, is the reliability of the Cuban government’s justifications for their policies. This is a challenge when analyzing any government, so you are surely not the first one to face it.
I was a little confused by your explanation when you mentioned that you will be assigning different economic strength levels on your own. I’m sure you have some method for that grounded in the research, and the time limit here makes it challenging to detail that. But you could go into more detail there for the final narrative paper. The same comment applies to the classification of Raul and Fidel Castro as an institutionalist and Marxist, respectively.
Luis — you have a good presentation here, and you’ve received some great suggestions from your peers in the comments above (so make sure to take those suggestions into account as you work on your Final Narrative Paper and think about your work in 306). Since you have chosen a small-n methodology I would work on refining the research question so it clearly asks about the specific case outcomes (the values of the DV that you have found) that you propose to explain. This, to me, really seems to be about the overall politics of entrepreneurialism in Cuba (the changes in *policy* as well as in *politics* and rhetoric). I would make that more explicit so we know exactly what you propose to explain from the question and statement of the puzzle. As you work on your operationalization for variables make sure to clearly state the variable in a way that makes it self-evident how that factor could vary (how it could be high/low, present/absent, etc.). Something like “external affairs” isn’t really a variable — what is the thing that is changing that you are trying to capture/measure? Finally, you might think about additional variables (since one of the strengths of the methodology is the ability to capture complex relationships) and, with that, hypotheses that focus on different combinations of causes or sequences of factors in explaining each of your cases. Keep up the reading and research — I look forward to seeing how this develops in the Final Narrative Paper and beyond!