7.1: What are Qualitative Methods?

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Define qualitative research methods
• Understand the strengths and limitations of qualitative research methods

Political science is the study of power, political authority, conflict, and negotiation, all of which can be approached through deep observation and analysis. In understanding these central foci of political life, there is a rich body of work employing qualitative research methods. Qualitative research refers to data collection in which the focus is on non-numerical data. This can include texts, interviews with individuals or groups, observations recorded by researchers, and many other sources of knowledge. Despite the quantitative turn that political science has taken in recent decades, qualitative approaches have provided powerful insights into many important research questions.

Early political thinkers from Aristotle to Sun Tze were deeply analytical in their approach to understanding the world, and they did so by observing and recording phenomena through nonnumerical means. Aristotle, in Book IV of Politics, discusses possible types of regimes in the world and argues that polity, a combination of democracy and oligarchy, is the best possible kind of government given his observations of human behavior.¹⁴ Today, political scientists employ a variety of qualitative research methods to understand topics as varied as the dynamics of revolution, campaign strategies, and the impact of political change on communities and individuals.

Qualitative methods can also be part of a larger methodological toolkit used by political scientists. Some scholars rely on “mixed methods” to answer their research questions about the world. Mixed methods utilize both qualitative and quantitative methods. For example, consider the research question, “Under what conditions might Texas become a purple state within the United States, i.e., a place that is a mix of Democratic and Republican voters?” Quantitative data may tell researchers about trends in voter registration and turnout over time. Qualitative methods, such as interviewing Texans in focus groups or town hall-style meetings, will illuminate how voters perceive their political choices and political future. The combination of both qualitative and quantitative data can overcome deficiencies in relying solely on one or the other.

The methods employed by qualitative researchers are myriad, and we will review several of them in this chapter (Table 7.1). Because politics are inherently relational, one starting point in the qualitative method toolkit is talking to people. This can take the form of interviews, either of a single individual or group of people. Documentary sources are also a valuable source of knowledge. Documents may be collected from repositories such as libraries or archives or when visiting relevant sites such as the offices of government bureaus or advocacy organizations. Ethnographic research involves “going into the field,” or conducting fieldwork at one or more research site(s) to address a research question. Fieldwork can include interviewing and document collection and analysis, but it is also a means for a researcher to collect and record observations about their subject.

For example, a Canadian political scientist interested in understanding US southern border policy might be well-served by conducting fieldwork on the US-Mexico border and observing the interplay between US government authorities and citizens on both sides of the border. There are also exciting research possibilities in the digital realm, and digital ethnographers are exploring political dynamics in this space. Some researchers, for example, are mapping the political communication strategies carried out on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. All these methods can come together in the building of case studies, which are in-depth examinations of particular cases to unravel one of the most challenging aspects of political science research, causal mechanisms. Each of these methods will be explored in a separate section in this chapter.

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Summary of Qualitative Methods

Qualitative Method	Brief description
Interviewing	Conversation with one or more people to collect data on a research question
Documentary sources	Texts collected from field sites, relevant organizations, libraries, archives, etc. Archival research, which often focuses on documentary sources, is especially powerful for collecting primary sources, or those documents which are original sources of knowledge on a topic
Ethnographic research	Site-specific collection of data; often referred to as “fieldwork”; researcher records observations “in the field” and may also rely on interviews and collection of documents
Digital ethnography	Collection of data in the cybersphere and observation of activity mediated by computers or related information technologies, including virtual reality
Case studies	Focused examination of an event, place, or individual to explore dynamics of analytical interest; case studies may employ some or all of the above methods

Strengths and limitations of qualitative methods

There are many reasons to employ qualitative methods in research. First and foremost, qualitative methods are useful for identifying causal mechanisms. Recall the scientific method emphasizes the formulation of testable hypotheses from broader theories. These hypotheses imply explanatory (independent) and outcome (dependent) variables. Linking explanatory and outcome variables is a causal logic. This causal logic is essential, as it tells a “story” that connects concepts. Qualitative methods, particularly case studies, can be powerful in illuminating causal mechanisms. If we think of theories as stories, qualitative methods are a way to knit together a narrative in a coherent and plausible way to help us know whether a story is true or false.

For example, scholars in international relations have long observed that modern democracies tend not to go to war with one another.¹⁵ Collecting data on regime type (democracy versus nondemocracy) and outbreak of war has yielded the finding that democracies over the past century have been unlikely to go to war with one another. But why is this? Statistical analysis may yield a significant correlation, but this is not causation. Qualitative methods such as detailed case studies of two democracies in a crisis situation can help uncover what led to reconciliation rather than war. This kind of “process tracing,” or uncovering the process by which events unfolded, is a strength of qualitative approaches.

A second strength of qualitative methods is producing more fine-grained and nuanced analysis than widely used quantitative methods such as regression analysis. Whereas regression analysis attempts to identify trendlines in collected data, fitting a straight line through a cloud of data points, qualitative methods are interested in the messiness of observed data. Qualitative methods, in short, are interested in depth over breadth. For example, it can be illuminating to see that race is a key correlate of party affiliation in the US, but interviewing individuals can help to drill down into how racial identity might shape whether a person identifies as a Democrat, Republican, or independent.¹⁶ Again, qualitative methods are helpful for understanding the “why” by digging into the details.

It is important to note the shortcomings of qualitative methods, too. They are typically very resource intensive. Downloading publicly available data from the Internet on is generally less costly than arranging interviews or making research plans to live in, say, Catalonia for a semester (no matter how delightful the latter would be). Qualitative methods can be resource-intensive, both in terms of time and money expended. Related, the resource-intensiveness of some qualitative methods, such as case studies, implies that a researcher may only generate one or a few of them to answer a research question. Suppose a researcher wanted to compare the quality of governance around the world. One quantitative starting point for exploring this topic would be to download the World Banks’ Worldwide Governance Indicators.¹⁷ A more in-depth, qualitative approach might be reading World Bank and other organizations’ reports on select countries’ governments. Crafting case studies of even two countries’ quality of governance might take weeks, months, or years of careful data collection and writing. This would yield an “n” of two -- and here again the tradeoff is depth over breadth.

A final critique of qualitative methods relates to the difficulty replicating findings. If one gold standard in hypothesis testing is replicability of research findings, this is challenging to achieve with many qualitative methods. The observations that a researcher might record while embedded in pro-independence organizations in Catalonia, Spain, are very difficult to confirm by subsequent researchers. Even if a researcher were to have access to the same fieldwork sites, they will likely face very different circumstances. Compounding this are issues with access to research sites. A researcher conducting fieldwork in China and visiting government bureaus may share their findings and conclusions in research papers, but due to the closed nature of the government in China, other researchers are unlikely to have access to the same government bureaus. This also relates to the reliability of inferences reached solely from qualitative research. If other researchers cannot confirm the data used for a research paper, how reliable are the findings? One workaround is employing mixed methods to triangulate across multiple sources and findings. This can at least demonstrate that the findings within a study have internal validity.

14 Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Aristotle: Politics,” available online at www.iep.utm.edu/arispol/#H10. Accessed August 2019.

15 See Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

16 See Pew Research Center, “Trends in party affiliation among demographic groups,” March 20, 2018. Available online at https://www.people-press.org/2018/03/20/1-trends-in-party-affiliation-among-demographic-groups/. Accessed August 2019.

17 These indicators have been tracked for 215 countries and territories over the period 1996-2014 and involve quantifying six different governance indicators. They are available for download from https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/worldwide-governance-indicators.