210028 UE BAK4: Empirical research using qualitative methods (2022S)

How can we study international negotiations and decision making processes? Which tools are available to make sense of what happens in negotiation rooms and to explain why policy-makers act and decide in a certain way? What is the role of political scientists in studying these processes?

Aims:
This seminar is an introduction to qualitative research. At the end of the seminar, students will have gained knowledge on a range of qualitative methods and their empirical applications. Students will understand why and how to use qualitative methods for empirical research and critically assess literature in light of the applied methods. They will have developed skills to formulate research questions and hypotheses from their preferred topics and continuously worked on their research designs over the time of the course. The students will have formulated their own research designs, conducted small-scale empirical research, and written a paper to answer their research questions by the end of the class. The seminar will also address how to combine different qualitative and quantitative methods.

Contents:
In this seminar, students are introduced to methodological approaches for studying political processes, with a focus on researching international environmental negotiations and decision making processes. This seminar benefits from the ongoing research of the MARIPOLDATA ERC research project which studies the current UN negotiations on a new international treaty for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ). The seminar enables students to develop an understanding of how to choose and apply qualitative methods in empirical research to meet their research goals. Course content will be structured into different parts: Research Design, Data Collection and Data Analysis.