komex: Comparative Case Study Design

This five-day in-person course provides you with the skills needed to design your qualitative comparative case study research, from defining research questions and concepts to selecting cases, choosing strategies for data collection and analysis, and addressing research-practical issues.

What Is This Course About?
A solid foundation in comparative case studies is essential for comparative social scientists. This five-day in-person course provides you with the skills needed to design your qualitative comparative case study research, based on your own and/or other applied research projects. The course covers the topics of causal complexity, concept formation, casing and case selection, logics and strategies of comparison, accounting for context and time, choosing data collection and analysis strategies, as well as conceptual and research-practical issues when drawing inferences in case-oriented research.

Learning Goals
After this course you will:

• Be able to find a suitable comparative case study research design to answer your research question.
• Learn common techniques of structuring and defining concepts, defining and selecting cases, thinking about time and context in comparative case study research, and analyzing and comparing cases depending on the inferential goal, and be able to apply them in your own research.
• Be aware of potential pitfalls of comparative case study research, such as limited empirical diversity and conceptual stretching, and ways of addressing them.
• Be familiar with some seminal texts about comparative case study research, covering both classics and recent innovations.

Timetable – 4h / day

• 09:00-10:30h
• 10:45-12:15h
• 13:30-14:30h

Who is Your Instructor?
Eva Thomann is a full professor at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz who specializes in case-oriented and set-theoretic research design and methodology, which she teaches at international method schools. She co-authored the textbook “Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) Using R: A Beginner’s Guide” (2021, Cambridge University Press, with Carsten Q. Schneider and Ioana-Elena Oana) and “Designing Research with Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA): Approaches, Challenges, Tools” (2020, Sociological Methods & Research, with Martino Maggetti). Eva Thomann is a board member of the COMPArative Methods for Systematic cross-caSe analysis (COMPASSS) and a founding member of the Methods Excellence Network (MethodsNet).
Twitter: @evathomann