Approach and Research Methods

This project is underpinned by an interpretive approach to the social sciences. This perspective places meanings - including values, beliefs, sentiments, passions, etc. - at the heart of social and political inquiry to explain political outcomes. Interpretive approaches have gained traction in recent years in political sciences, and especially use of ethnographic methods. However, interpretive research could still go further by experimenting with quantitative methods and tools, and to conduct comparative research. This is one area where SPARK seeks to innovate and push interpretive research into new terrain. The project team will study parliaments using a baseline of six tools, and consider further ways to understand how knowledge is gathered, analysed and used in parliaments. Importantly, the team acknowledges that no single, individual tool will get a full picture of knowledge use - it is the combination across different tools that we can gain a detailed view.

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Our six tools are: (1) corpus analysis of parliamentary speech; (2) citation analysis of documents; (3) stakeholder database of actors involved in parliamentary activities; (4) interviews with key actors; (5) non-participant observation of parliamentary work; and (6) qualitative analysis of texts.