Research Methods
Lecture 4
Interactive Multi-disciplinary Methodology

1.Redefining research paradigms – the interactive multi-disciplinary approach
2. A case study – the 1989 East and Central European Revolutions
a) a range of multi-disciplinary causes
b) initial methodology – J.S. Mill’s ‘Method of Agreement’ and ‘Method of Difference’
c) counterfactualism

1.Redefining research paradigms
- social science disciplinary divisions (and    research divisions) derived from the    dominant
liberal ideology of the 19th    century (divisions between self-contained arenas of economics and
politics - market and state)
- residual arena of ‘irrational          behaviour’ = sociology
BUT throughout course of 20th century discipline variables increasingly overlapped and interacted
as societies became more complex

2. A case study: the 1989 Revolutions of East and central Europe
a) causes of events of 1989 in     Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania,         Bulgaria, Poland, GDR
(East Germany)
b) John Stuart Mill’s ‘Method of   Agreement’ and ‘Method of Difference’
c) Counterfactualism (‘New Economic       Historians’ – R.W. Fogel, G.R. Hawke –  comparison of
‘social savings’ in U.S.A  and Britain’s 19th century industrialisation)

HYBRIDISATION?