Methodology

This chapter discusses methodological issues in Europeanization research. Europeanization research draws its theories mainly from international relations, comparative politics and public administration. Methodology as such, however, is invariant to specific social science disciplines. The general methodological question of any social science research endeavor can be posed as: how should we design our research and shape our strategies of data collection and analysis in order to achieve a maximum of reliability and validity given a specific research question and theoretical framework? More specifically, this chapter deals with two questions. The first question juxtaposes qualitative/case study research and quantitative/statistical research: Which strategies are utilized in Europeanization research and has this stream of research been able to exploit fully the strengths of the respective strategy while minimizing its weaknesses?

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