Methods Encounters

Looking further into the discourse for my project, it became increasingly difficult for me to organize the diction and phrasing I was attempting to code for the data portion of my paper. After speaking with Professor Seybert in Brussels, she pointed me in the direction of Nvivo, a coding program you can use to organize the words you are trying to code. The issue now is figuring out how to work it. It is available through the CTRL lab in the AU website, and there are workshop times listed, an option to make an appointment with the research librarians, or online manuals to teach yourself. Unfortunately, it seems as though there are no workshops available for the workshops, so I will be attempting to teach myself through the manuals and YouTube videos while also emailing the librarians (again) to see if they can offer me any further assistance.

My main problem right now is that I haven't done much work besides conducting the interviews and finding some government speeches because of all the stuff we're doing here in Madrid.  I feel like this is a pretty big problem because I'm not used to waiting to do things since I'm usually the opposite of a procrastinator.  However at the same time, I think that once I finish finding speeches and compile my notes on the speeches (which I will do during my layover because it's 6 hours long) it shouldn't be that hard to finish the rest of the data analysis and from there I will only have to write up the essay. Hopefully once I'm home I can stay focused on this and make up for the time I've lost.

As a writer, for me, having control over a paper which is this long and detailed is intimidating. I am examining the role of two iconic women in creating female empowerment. While I know that the two women, Mukhtar Mai and Malala Yousafzai have had a huge impact in terms of female empowerment in Pakistan, I am not sure how to relate statistics of education rate, reduced rape cases (in certain areas) and increased female employment is a direct outcome of the work done by Mukhtar Mai/Malala. Moreover, trying to write it all out coherently is far from easy, and the worst part is not knowing what to do about it. To ease this process, I am trying to write this research paper section by section, where in some ways I feel that I am getting a hold of it and at other times I feel like I am not making any sense. May the odds be in everyone's favor!

During my time in Spain and Belgium, I have clearly noticed two flaws with my research. The first one is that I have a lack of access to information about Saudi Arabia and Iran. To solve my first flaw, I have started to think about creative ways I can gather my information. My last blog, I said that I will try to trace Saudi-Iran relation information through the speeches of leaders from US or other leading nations. In addition to that I have come up with a new idea to obtain information. Recently, the new crown prince of Saudi incident gave me the idea to look into conversation between Saudi King/ Iran and leading countries on a diplomatic visit. The second flaw with my research is that I am focusing on too many events. Some of them might not even help me. I really need to sit down and think about what event beside Iranian Revolution would help my research.

Hello my fellow three years- I hope you all are enjoying Europe, but I know you're all dying to know my research difficulties at the moment, so here we go. My greatest problem at the moment is deciding how I want to organize all of my content in a way where I can easily access all of it without having to scroll for five minutes to find a certain section or in a way that doesn't require having approximately 100 tabs open. I'm pretty solid on creating an outline and organizing the content of the paper, or so I think, but I am anxious on how its execution is playing out. I fear this thing will be extremely difficult to edit due to its length and when I think of adding something to a certain section, I'm afraid I will forget what I was planning to add by the time I find that particular section. I'm not sure exactly how to solve this yet and I've talked to Professor Seybert a little bit about it, but I'm sure I'll find some way to keep track of all of this...

I'm at a point now where most of my problems could potentially solve themselves once I start working on my project in a more consistent manner. I still feel like the solutions I'm finding to my operationalization issue are inadequate, but I won't really know until I try to analyse some of my documents. I made some progress after watching a series of Margaret Thatcher's speeches that made me want to staple my ears shut and unfortunately it seems like there's going to be a lot more of those in my future. Nevertheless, the speeches were able to give me some examples of words I could potentially use to code the documents. Apart from that issue, my concerns now are more to do with writing the paper itself and what things specifically I should be paying attention to. In terms of policy relevance, I was having some trouble figuring out exactly how my project is relevant, so it was helpful to clarify that it's my topic that's relevant, not necessarily my case.

I have made a significant change regarding my case selection. I had originally chosen to compare Singapore’s rates of sex trafficking, which are relatively low with Thailand’s rates of sex trafficking, which are relatively high. However, I discovered, through my research that a better contrast would be to use Philippines as a contrast to Thailand because Philippines has been notably more successful at combatting sex trafficking than Singapore. I would never think that a developing country, like the Philippines, would be more successful at combatting human trafficking than a highly developed country, such as Singapore. In this way, I am definitely going to use Singapore as an alternative explanation to figure out why it is that a highly developed country is less adept at fighting human trafficking than a less developed country. While I know this change will require a significant amount of time, I am hopeful that my overall project will be strengthened as a result. During t...

As I develop my project, I have to create a guideline by which I can evaluate my films. But in order to create that guideline, I need to watch other films to base it off. The films I will be watching for that will be the films "Sultan" and "Masquerade". "Sultan" is a Bollywood film narrating a fictional story about a "pro-wrestler" and the struggles he goes through as he grapples with the death of his son. "Masquerade" is Korean film that depicts the historical interpretation of the missing 15 days in the record of the Joseon Dynasty, following the story of a King that switches roles with a peasant to thwart assassination attempts. Common themes that I am on the lookout for are fatherhood, political upheaval and common Indian/Korean values. The final list for films I am examining for my research project is: Bollywood: PK , Bajrangi Baijan , and Dangal . Korean: Werewolf Boy , The Admiral: Roaring Currents , and Train to Busan .  ...

So currently I have doubled the amount of communities within my data set to have a total 101 communities. This is a good thing! It will give me more correlation and more of an idea whether there will be a trend in my data. My next problem is determining control variables for my multiple regression analysis. I am measuring the Human Development Index (HDI) of the country. This includes economic variables like GDP and GNI of the country, and other measures like that. The problem with this is that they only describe the country, but not by community. The other control variable I am measuring is the percentage of households within the community that was their hands. I am trying to find at least one more control variable that factors in economic development by other organizations, like NGO's, that is put into the community. I do not think this information is available anywhere however. What I would really want is the number of hospitals and or clinics within a community. But what I ha...

When I met with Professor Seybert last week, she asked me if I could think of any real-world applications for my research. In other words: policy recommendations. At first, I was just thinking of the obvious. My research could be used to better understand and work out the Israel-Palestine conflict. But that felt stale, untrue, and obviously, Jared Kushner has the whole situation under control, so my research felt irrelevant in that sense. But then, I thought back to my very first research design and literature review. At first, I was focusing on Israeli education and the school system's treatment of minorities. The initial research I did for the first lit review pointed to a lot of bias in the education system that painted Arabs very negatively. My new research could be used to look at education policy in a new way. My research is discourse analysis of the way a Palestinian NGO talks about human rights abuses versus the way an Israeli NGO talks about human rights abuses. My researc...

I have been struggling with a lot while working on my 306 paper. The main problem I have been having, other than not have had Wi-Fi, is that statistical analysis is hard. For the first part of my paper I am using a replicated model, and while that eliminates controlling for some variables it does make the process easy. It look me awhile to track down the data I thought would be easy to access, and I had to hack the Duke Library to access it. The biggest blow to my paper though has been the fact that I found out that data on the rates of education in different regions of Nigeria simply does not exist. I was able to receive some background information on the topic and am conducting more research as we speak, but may switch to a different case study where data is more available, even though it makes me very sad. I am however somewhat happy because this means I do not have to do more stats. I am excited to do more research on the topic as opposed to simply be crunching numbers as...

I originally posted this as a comment under Professor Seybert's first post because Blogspot would not let me log in. But I was just able to log in, so here's a re-post: I am trying to answer the question: How do manifestations of nationalism in post-genocidal Rwanda affect the emergence of female politicians in the country? My IV is Rwandan nationalism and my DV is female political participation in Rwanda. I will be doing positivist discourse analysis. The reason I mention this is because the source of my troubles right now is not being secure with the measures of my IV. The current measures of my IV are the words that I am coding in my discourse analysis, but I am having trouble finding words that have been used in multiple documents because there are so many definitions of nationalism. Do y'all have any suggestions for general words or phrases that indicate nationalism and might be used in multiple documents?

It took multiple attempts to find the right research question to ask. From the onset of the 206 class I had a general premise of what I was going to research. I wanted to analyze the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iran. My initial idea was that religion was the cause of the struggle between the two states. Since that first meeting my research question has changed five or six times the reason being is there were just too many variables and my research question was always too general. There are multiple ways to analyze Saudi Arabia and Iran I just needed to find the right research question and variables. Realizing what the problem was I focused more on making my research question more specific and focused on variables that I believed were important to my research question. After careful research I believe I have finally found the right research question that I'm interested in pursuing. While I'm still analyzing Saudi Arabia and Iran I'm now focused on a different aspec...

From the very start, I knew for my research, I would face challenges to find data sources about Saudi Arabia and Iran. For my last assignment for 306, I wanted t o measure my independent and dependent variable through speeches and actions made by key players. At first, I was having trouble finding speeches and actions to support my research because I had very limited access to Iran and Saudi Arabia's information. I narrowed my search to key events. I started to look for speeches or actions that took place after major events. Once again, I failed. After going through many trials and errors, I came up with an idea to find this evidence through the lens of the United States or other leading countries that hold information which is much more accessible. I started to look for speeches made by the president of US at the time and tried to detect a line that I can use as an evidence for my research. 

A difficulty is encountered while I was researching the factthat after switching cases from Hungary to Slovakia, it has slightly more leg kettle to collect data and research dedicated to That particular case. Largely this is due to the more direct impacts That Hungary has had on the migrant crisis, as well as Their President's Viktor Orban's notoriety in addressing the issue. This is not a serious issue, as all vital information and official statistics are easily found, However the difference in Slovakia's presence Compared to Hungary is notable.

Thankfully neither of my main problems are surprises, but they're definitely still problems. So first, only one Senador in the Spanish Cortes Generales (congress/parliament) has time for an interview, so I do have at least one, but I should have more officials in order to incorporate them well into my project.  I was thinking of also maybe interviewing Paco because he got his degree in history and he is really into Spanish politics (we literally talked about it for an hour today during our class); he also is really knowledgable about the different separatist/independence movements in some of the autonomous provinces.  And then maybe trying to find one or two other people to ask to interview (maybe at my internship?) if any of them are familiar with these issues, but I'm not sure if that's a good idea because they aren't necessarily experts on it.  My other problem is doing my discourse analysis to look for national identity because I've been able to find an archive ...

How To Identify Identity The question of how an increase in regional identity in comparison to national identity and how they lead to secessionist groups are something that's pretty difficult to answer-  especially  when everyone defies identity differently. First, I have to sort through how people define regionalism and regional identity in compared to nationalism and national identity. Then, I have to find figure out how to measure them. I have come up with a few different ways: regional holidays, the presence of a distinct language, sports teams, votes for independence but I feel like these are vague sometimes and sometimes they're not. It's trying to make my measurements specific but applicable enough to my cases. My cases, if you are wondering, are Quebec, Canada and Catalonia, Spain. Also, I'm trying to figure out how to make my research more focused on the secessionist group themselves rather than just the act of seceding. I haven't figured that out y...

In my attempt to use process tracing to follow the United States and Nigeria on their paths to their modern day space programs, I've hit a bit of a roadblock in my data collection. The Nigerian government offers an array of useful data online that I can use to bolster my argument, but they don't seem to offer reliable access to their webpages. When I attempt to reach a Nigerian website, I've learned to go in with reasonable doubt of actually getting there. The average reliability is around a 90%  success rate, but this can increase and decrease drastically depending on a specific site. At this point, I've resigned to just reaching out to Nigerian officials, but I'm mostly expecting them to send back an email that says something along the lines of: Warning: mysqli_query(): (HY000/1030): Got error 28 from storage engine in /home/nigerianstat/public_html/class/database.class.php on line 112 Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'Exception' with mes...

As a recap, my research project is a look into the motivations countries will get involved in international epidemics. So one of the biggest problems that I’ve been encountering while doing this research project which may come very easy to others is simply trying to switch my project to a more qualitative analysis versus quantitative. Even looking at the question, “what are you measuring” its frustrating when I find myself more comfortable with numbers and yet am evaluating reasons and motivations. To get myself out of this rut, I keep on rewriting my question four or five times until I can find the wording that works best. This has so far made it more able for me to understand qualitative data better.

What's up y'all, hope everyone is enjoying Europe/wherever else in the world you are! So, recently, I have been encountering two main issues in my research- it's been difficult to not drift back to primarily focusing on Russia and Crimea and pay equal attention to the other annexation cases I am looking at, especially since the Russia/Ukraine annexation was solely what my original research question was about. Additionally, so far, as I sift through sources a lot of them are largely what I've been calling "superficial." A lot of the popular, mainstream international affairs journals and international news outlets don't seem to contain a lot of analysis, and, maybe I am interpreting the sources inefficiently, but to me it looks as though they merely document what was going on at the time or trying to predict what will happen next. I hope to look into some news methods of obtaining information soon and some alternate sources, but I would love to hear what ...

Just as a quick refresher on my project! My question is:   “How does international pressure affect domestic policies of land tenure and in turn, does the subsequent policies become a catalyst for increase environmental sustainability?” I think my biggest struggle thus far is getting distracted by everything that has to be done in the future, which in turn makes me more overwhelmed with the task at hand. For example with the Data Collection Assignment I kept flashing forward and thinking about how I was going to analyze the data I was collecting which was a bit stressful. Not to say that thinking full picture is bad but I think since the scope of this assignment is so large (being almost 8 months and all), it is better to take it piece by piece. What I have been doing thus far to cope with this issue is doing a lot of flow charts so I mentally have a plan of what I have to do but then leaving that alone and focusing on the assignment at hand. I am definitely missing the study rooms ...

So the data collection assignment has really been great for poking holes in my research design and pointing out that I still don't 100% know what I'm doing, which is nice (?). I still need to think more carefully about exactly what words I'm going to focus on for the discourse analysis portion of my project, but at least the assignment for today forced me to figure some of that out. Today I also learned that I'm really bad at keeping sources organized and labeling files that contain important data, but at least doing the data collection thing forced me to get things sorted out a little better. I've started to play around with Nvivo a little bit as well, so if anyone else is in the same boat or knows of any good resources to learn, let me know--it would be much appreciated!

I have made a pretty nice amount of progress so far. Both components: the process tracing as well as the data collection exercise has helped me to organize my information much better; the data collection exercise, especially, has helped me to specify my measurements much more. One concern that I originally had was how best to conduct process tracing since I was not focusing on a specific historical event. After some thought, I realized that the best way would be by tracing the various steps that both NGOs and the government has taken to combat human trafficking. For the continuation of 306, I will proceed with the process tracing activity a little differently than before. For the process tracing exercise, I factored in two major approaches (top-down and bottom-up). One change is that for the paper, I will actually be specifying further in order to incorporate various levels of support and cooperation that the NGO has received from the government or lack thereof.

For my research project, I decided to take Pakistan as a case to look at societal impacts of female economic empowerment. As I researched for data, I started to see that my research was revolving around the work of certain figures (Malala, Mukhtar Mai) who are famous for their work for female empowerment in Pakistan. I finally accepted the fact that evaluating societal change will be difficult, if possible at all. Therefore, my solution to this was to look at my topic with a different angle, so now I am planning to look at the role of female iconic figures such as Malala and Mukhtar Mai in empowering females in Pakistan. This changes my original independent and dependent variable, therefore, my topic has in a way changed as per how the data has lead me so far but I feel more satisfied with my current angle of this topic.

This week I turned all of my excess attention to working on how to figure out SPSS. Unfortunately, as much as I like making graphs on SPSS, graphs on SPSS don't like me. I was attempting to use graphs to see how the data would play out. Since I am a visual person I felt that this was a better option for me. After succeeding in creating one graph and getting my equations ready I realized that statistics was not as fresh in my mind as I hoped it to be. I still believe that statistical analysis is the best way to answer my question so I don't have as many worries or qualms as other people might. I am still trying to figure SPSS out fully but online crash courses in statistics are helping me remember