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How does one develop a research design based on process-tracing? This question highlights a major challenge in teaching and adopting process-tracing methods. Although there is an expanding body of work on the approach (Beach and Pedersen 2013; Bennett and Checkel 2015; Humphreys and Jacobs 2015; Mahoney 2012; Rohlfing 2014), we are still faced with Collier’s (2011, 823) lamentation: “Too often this tool is neither well understood nor rigorously applied” (see also Blatter and Blume 2008, 318; Zaks 2017). One central concern is that there are few instructional materials in the qualitative-methods canon (Elman, Kapiszewski, and Kirilova 2015; Kapiszewski, MacLean, and Read 2014). This article provides a short, practical guide for developing a process-tracing research design. The corresponding online appendix applies this guide to four examples, thereby offering a tool for researchers seeking to employ and instructors planning to teach this method.
The material is organized in the form of a checklist that provides introductory guideposts to help researchers structure their research designs. This article is not a comprehensive literature review (Kay and Baker 2015), and neither is it the final word on what constitutes good process-tracing (Waldner 2015). There remains much work to be done in defining, delineating, and developing process-tracing methods, and we advise graduate students and advanced researchers to become familiar with these debates (Beach and Pedersen 2013; Bennett and Checkel 2015). Instead, our contribution is to make process-tracing accessible and more readily applicable to beginners without being distracted by ongoing methodological discussions.
The discussion is limited to one type of process-tracing: theory testing (Beach and Pedersen 2013). Specifically, we focus on the systematic study of the link between an outcome of interest and an explanation based on the rigorous assessing and weighting of evidence for and against causal inference. By defining process-tracing in these terms, we emphasize the role of theory and the empirical testing of hypotheses. The challenge is to assemble a research design equipped to do so.
THE CHECKLIST
To craft a research design based on process-tracing, we suggest that researchers must (1) define their theoretical expectations, (2) give direction to their research, and (3) identify the types of data necessary for testing a theory. Stated differently, the steps outlined in figure 1 set the stage for implementing best practices...