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virtual

Working with Concepts

Course Dates and Times

Monday 7 – Friday 11 August 2023
Minimum 2 hours of live teaching per day
15:00 – 17:00 CEST

Frederic Schaffer, course instructor for Working with Concepts at ECPR's Research Methods and Techniques
Frederic Schaffer

frederic@umass.edu

University of Massachusetts Amherst

This seminar-style course offers an engaging and interactive online teaching and learning experience, utilizing cutting-edge pedagogical tools. It is tailored for a discerning audience consisting of researchers, professional analysts, and advanced students, and enrollment is limited to a maximum of 12 participants to ensure personalized attention from the instructor.

Purpose of the course

This course aims to explore the importance of concepts in the social-science enterprise. You will learn about two different approaches to conceptualization:

  • the positivist approach, which emphasizes the creation of technical and neutral vocabularies for measurement and comparison, also known as concept 'formation' or 'reconstruction'; and
  • the interpretivist approach, which focuses on 'elucidation' to gain insight into the worldviews of the people being studied. In this course, we will also examine how social scientists' backgrounds, including their language, historical era, and power structures, can shape the concepts they use in their work

 

ECTS Credits

4 credits - Engage fully in class activities and complete a post-class assignment

Instructor Bio

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.

In this course, you will gain a comprehensive understanding of positivist reconstruction and interpretivist elucidation, including their presuppositions, objectives, and tools. You will learn how to construct concepts by defining and organising properties, placing them on a ladder of generality, building complex ladders that incorporate diminished subtypes, and evaluating their quality based on criteria such as external differentiation, internal coherence, explanatory utility, and content validity.

You will also be introduced to basic elucidative strategies inspired by ordinary language philosophy and Foucauldian genealogy, and learn how to recognise and address issues of one-sidedness, universalism, and objectivism in social science concepts.

How the course will work online

This course takes advantage of the flexibility afforded by online teaching to offer a rich, multi-modal learning experience that includes:

  • Pre-course readings that provide you with foundational knowledge about working with concepts in the social sciences.
  • Independent but collaborative reading that gives you foundational knowledge about working with concepts.
  • Recorded lectures that teach you about the presuppositions, aims, and tools of positivist reconstruction and interpretivist elucidation.
  • Independent exercises that allow you to build your reconstructive and elucidative skills.
  • Live sessions that give an opportunity for class discussion and afford you practice in reconstructing and elucidating a concept that you have chosen yourself.

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.

What you'll need

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

  • Internet connection on a computer with Zoom installed
  • Ability to work in Google docs.
  • Access (from your home institution) to Jstor and the Oxford English Dictionary is optimal but not essential.
  • A tablet, laptop or second monitor to view worksheets during live sessions may be useful but is not essential.

How the course will work online

This course takes advantage of the flexibility afforded by online teaching to offer a rich, multi-modal learning experience that includes:

  • Pre-course readings that provide you with foundational knowledge about working with concepts in the social sciences.
  • Independent but collaborative reading that gives you foundational knowledge about working with concepts.
  • Recorded lectures that teach you about the presuppositions, aims, and tools of positivist reconstruction and interpretivist elucidation.
  • Independent exercises that allow you to build your reconstructive and elucidative skills.
  • Live sessions that give an opportunity for class discussion and afford you practice in reconstructing and elucidating a concept that you have chosen yourself.

There is no prior knowledge required for this course. All of the information you need will be covered in the lectures and tutorials.