Pullman – The Department of Political Science and the Department of Sociology at Washington State University will present a Methodology Symposium 4 to 6 p.m. March 23, in room 518 of the Smith Center for Undergraduate Education. A reception will follow.
The symposium will feature researcher Gary Goertz, professor of political science at the University of Arizona. His lecture, “A Tale of Two Cultures: Contrasting Quantitative and Qualitative Research,” will be held in partnership with the journal “Political Research Quarterly (PRQ),” which is edited by Washington State University faculty.
“Goertz’s talk will provide a forum for social scientists at WSU, both graduates and faculty, to come together,” said Amy Mazur, professor of political science and coeditor of “PRQ.” “We expect the symposium to introduce opportunities to talk about the links to our approach to conducting research and our results in terms of solving larger societal problems, through ‘problem-driven’ research and the ‘public academy’,” Mazur said.
“The talk should be of wide-ranging interest to academics because there are lots of debates about these issues,” said Goertz. “In particular there are strong conflicts between qualitative and quantitative approaches to doing research. Because methodology is so basic, it can be as important as the actual substantive issues being studied,” Goertz said.
Goertz is the author or coauthor of five books and more than 25 articles on issues of international institutions, methodology and conflict studies. His most recent methodological work deals with the construction of concepts and is titled “Concepts: A User’s Guide” (Princeton University Press, 2006). He is editor of a special issue of the journal “Political Analysis” entitled “Causal Complexity and Qualitative Methods” (2006).
For more information:
Washington State University: http://www.wsu.edu/
WSU’s Department of Political Science: http://libarts.wsu.edu/polisci/
WSU’s Department of Sociology: http://libarts.wsu.edu/soc/
Political Research Quarterly: http://prq.sagepub.com/
