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This book examines social science concepts through an interpretivist lens with the aim of providing concrete conceptual guidance for future research. Specifically, this book seeks to: 1) identify characteristic dangers that attend the making and use of reconfigured concepts; 2) lay out ways in which a select number of interpretivist approaches have been used to mitigate these dangers; 3) introduce practical tools that rework these interpretivist approaches into explicit and useable research methods; 4) show concretely how these elucidation tools can be gainfully used by social scientists working both within and outside of the interpretivist tradition.
List of contents
Contents: Preface 1. Why Do Concepts Need Elucidating? 2. Grounding: Elucidating How People Understand a Concept 3. Locating: Elucidating Historical and Linguistic Specificity 4. Exposing: Elucidating Power 5. The Ethics of Elucidating
About the author
Frederic Charles Schaffer is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He served two terms as chair of the Committee on Concepts and Methods of the International Political Science Association and teaches ethnographic methods at the Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, which is attended each summer by approximately 180 participants from schools, departments, and research centers around the world. A past Program Chair for the Interpretation and Methods Conference Group of the American Political Science Association, he now serves as a member of the Group’s Executive Committee. Schaffer is the author of Democracy in Translation: Understanding Politics in an Unfamiliar Culture and The Hidden Costs of Clean Election Reform, and the editor of Elections for Sale: The Causes and Consequences of Vote Buying.
