“Reading” “ Methods” “Texts”: ” How Research Methods Texts Construct Political Science

Abstract

This article reports on an interpretive content analysis of fourteen research methods texts. We read them as a genre—exploring their structural and rhetorical features—to address two questions: To what extent do research methods texts reflect the breadth of methods used in political science and its fields? To what extent do they reflect contemporary ferment concerning questions of social reality and its “knowability?” These questions are intertwined with each other—epistemological positions on what counts as “science” affect the methods presented—and with the misleading distinction between “quantitative” and “qualitative” methods. Although these texts vary considerably in the degree to which they engage epistemologcal issues. all fourteen texts explicitly endorsed or implicitly assumed positivist definitions of science, which can be seen in their treatments of “qualitative” methods issues. Interpretive methods of data access and analysis are almost entirely “disappeared,” and positivist qualitative methods of data access receive treatment that ranges from poor to excellent. This textual consensus on positivism as the mode of scientific research in political science has implications for professional practice in four areas: the possibility of field-neutral methods texts, student research agendas, disciplinary meanings associated with “method” and “methodology,” and researchers' professional identity as political scientists.