Letter to the Editor

The Qualitative Methods newsletter is one year old! It seems like only yesterday . . . Volume 1, Issue No. 1 (Spring 2003) focused on the practical task of teaching a qualitative methods course. It featured retrospective evaluations by a number of instructors and an extensive canvas of qualmeth syllabi and textbooks. Volume 1, Issue No. 2 (Fall 2003) focused on interpretivist approaches, and included contributions from Robert Adcock, David Dessler, Clifford Geertz, David Laitin, Laura Stoker, Dvora Yanow, and myself. (Following protocol, past issues will be available to non-section members one year after publication. Thus, Volume 1, Issue No. 1 is now available on-line on the CQRM web site at http://www.asu.edu/clas/polisci/cqrm/Qualitative MethodsAPSA.html. Volume 1, Issue No. 2 will become available this Fall.) The current issue takes on two challenging topics, field research and content/discourse analysis. The field research symposium, with contributions from Marc Howard, Evan Lieberman and Julia Lynch, is the culmination of a series of seminars led by the authors at APSA and IQRM meetings over the past several years. It commits to print, for the first time, the practical, hands-on wisdom imparted in these valuable sessions. The second symposium, organized by Yoshiko Herrera and Bear Braumoeller, addresses comparisons and contrasts between two research methods directed to the analysis of textual evidence – content analysis and discourse analysis. Since the material of politics is often textual in nature, it behooves us to consider these methodological issues carefully. What does it mean to analyze a text? What assumptions are required? What is the most appropriate method(s)? Plans for future issues of the newsletter are beginning to take shape. If all goes as planned, the Fall 2004 issue will include three symposia. The first, on Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), will include contributions from Andrew Bennett, James Mahoney, Charles Ragin, Benoit Rihoux, and Jason Seawright. The second, on the application of economic models to the study of politics, will include a lead essay by Sanjay Reddy, along with various responses. The third, on the Spring 2004, Vol. 2, No. 1

[1]  B. Greenberg,et al.  Life on Television: Content Analyses of U.S. TV Drama , 1980 .

[2]  Ernesto Laclau,et al.  Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory , 1979 .

[3]  S. Hall,et al.  Signification, representation, ideology: Althusser and the post‐structuralist debates , 1985 .

[4]  J. Agnew,et al.  Geopolitics and discourse: Practical geopolitical reasoning in American foreign policy , 1992 .

[5]  P. Bourdieu.  The social space and the genesis of groups , 1985 .

[6]  B. Everitt,et al.  An Introduction to Latent Variable Models , 1984 .

[7]  Gaston H. Gonnet,et al.  Efficient Ordering of Hash Tables , 1979, SIAM J. Comput..

[8]  V. Hudson,et al.  Artificial Intelligence and International Politics Gaming , 2020 .

[9]  Stavros Christodoulakis,et al.  Message files , 1982, TOIS.

[10]  L. Gross,et al.  Living with television: the violence profile. , 1976, The Journal of communication.

[11]  Cathy Schwichtenberg.  The Love Boat: the packaging and selling of love, heterosexual romance, and family , 1984 .

[12]  J. Ian Munro,et al.  Self-organizing binary search trees , 1976, 17th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (sfcs 1976).

[13]  N. Fairclough.  Discourse and social change , 1992 .

[14]  C. Mouffe,et al.  Hegemony and Socialist Strategy , 1985 .

[15]  W. Charters,et al.  Motion Pictures and Youth: A Summary , 1989 .

[16]  M. Foucault,et al.  The archaeology of knowledge ; and, The discourse on language , 1972 .

[17]  J. M. Atkinson,et al.  Order in Court: The Organisation of Verbal Interaction in Judicial Settings , 1980 .

[18]  Roxanne Lynn Doty,et al.  Foreign Policy as Social Construction: A Post-Positivist Analysis of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy in the Philippines , 1993 .

[19]  Jack S. Levy,et al.  Preferences, Constraints, and Choices in July 1914 , 1990 .

[20]  S. Hall.  The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists''in , 1988 .

[21]  Lawrence R. Rabiner,et al.  A tutorial on hidden Markov models and selected applications in speech recognition , 1989, Proc. IEEE.

[22]  A. Hunt,et al.  Discourse, ideology, discourse, ideology, discourse, ideology... , 1993 .

[23]  M. Coulthard,et al.  Advances in Spoken Discourse Analysis , 1992 .

[24]  G. Lakoff,et al.  Metaphors We Live by , 1982 .

[25]  Gaston H. Gonnet,et al.  A constructive approach to the design of algorithms and their data structures , 1983, CACM.

[26]  Frank Burton,et al.  Order in Court , 1979, The Routledge Handbook of Forensic Linguistics.

[27]  Earl R. Babbie,et al.  Observing Ourselves: Essays in Social Research , 1986 .