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Member rate £492.50
Non-Member rate £985.00
Save £45 Loyalty discount applied automatically*
Save 5% on each additional course booked
*If you attended our Methods School in the last calendar year, you qualify for £45 off your course fee.
Monday 1 – Friday 5 August 2022
2 hours of live teaching per day
15:00 – 17:00 CEST
This seminar-type course provides a highly interactive online teaching and learning environment, using state of the art online pedagogical tools. It is designed for a demanding audience (researchers, professional analysts, advanced students) and capped at a maximum of 12 participants so that the Instructor can cater to the specific needs of each individual.
Concepts are foundational to the social-science enterprise. This course introduces you to two distinct ways to think about and work with them.
One is the positivist approach to what is called concept 'formation' or 'reconstruction' – the formulation of a technical, neutral vocabulary for measuring, comparing, and generalising.
The other is an interpretivist approach that focuses on what I call 'elucidation.' Elucidation illuminates the worldviews of the people whom social scientists wish to understand, and the ways in which social scientists’ embeddedness in particular languages, historical eras, and power structures shapes the concepts with which they do their work.
3 credits Engage fully with class activities
4 credits Complete a post-class assignment
Frederic Schaffer is a professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he teaches comparative politics. His research examines the meaning and practice of democracy across cultures and back in time. His methodological writings develop language-centred approaches to foundational research tasks like comparing, interviewing, and working with concepts.
He is the past chair of both the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods group of the American Political Science Association and the Committee on Concepts and Methods of the International Political Science Association. Among his publications are:
His most recent methodological writings include "Two Ways to Compare" in Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry (2021) and "What is Interpretivist Interviewing?” in The Oxford Handbook of Methodological Pluralism in Political Science (forthcoming 2024). Interviews with him appear in Democractic Theory (2023), Politologija and the New Books in Political Science (2020) podcast.
Frederic’s ECPR course—Working with Concepts—received the Cora Maas Award for the best course at the 2022 ECPR Winter School and Summer School in Methods and Techniques. In addition to teaching at ECPR, he has offered methods workshops hosted by a variety of institutes, organisations, and universities including the Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, the Kind Institute in collaboration with the Southern Political Science Association, the Methods Excellence Network, Concordia University, Pompeu Fabra University, the University of Innsbruck, and the German Institute for Global and Area Studies.
This course will teach you about the presuppositions, aims, and tools of positivist reconstruction and interpretivist elucidation.
With regard to reconstruction, you will learn how to how to construct concepts by defining and organising properties; how to situate the concept on a ladder of generality; how to build more complex ladders of generality that include diminished subtypes; and how to assess the goodness of a concept using the criteria of external differentiation, internal coherence, explanatory utility, and content validity.
With regard to elucidation, you will learn basic elucidative strategies derived from ordinary language philosophy and Foucauldian genealogy and how to assess the goodness of social-science concepts by recognising problems of one-sidedness, universalism, and objectivism.
This course takes advantage of the flexibility afforded by online teaching to offer a rich, multi-modal learning experience that includes:
During the week, you should expect to spend roughly four hours each day on homework (readings, watching videos, completing exercises) in addition to the two-hour live class sessions.
A concept or two
You will need to identify one or two concepts relevant to your own research interests. You'll be working with these concepts during several hands-on exercises.
Hardware, software and database requirements
None