Research design for studying development in border areas: case studies towards the big picture?

Sarolta Németh,Ágnes Németh,Virpi Kaisto

doi:10.4000/belgeo.10582

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the research design of four recent border related research projects, all operating in European multi-case study frameworks. All these studied projects have the aim of producing, on the one hand, regionally specific research results and, on the other hand, results that bear relevance to general border theories. Furthermore, most of these researches have to provide messages for policy makers and not only on the local-regional but on a more general, European level. This paper discusses what research designs the projects have chosen to operate in to reach all of these objectives. The focus is on two major aspects that have an impact on the research designs and are connected to the need for abstraction from specific contextual cases: comparative framework and policy relevance on different levels.

Highlights

How can multiple-case studies reach valid generalisations? We analyse four recent international, European-scale research projects that study the development in several different border areas and see how they have applied a multiple-case study approach to produce both on the one hand, regional- or case-specific research results, and on the other hand, messages that bear relevance to general border theories and higher, European level policy making
The Unfamiliarity initiative serves as an umbrella for a set of multidisciplinary collaborative research projects that share the aim of investigating the “softer” constituent elements of bordering such as dialect and language, religion, historical geography, ethnogenesis, invented tradition and material culture, but otherwise handle very different cases
The research projects drawn on as examples in this paper found different means to avoid this risk within their specific timeframes and financial resource limits; three of them, for instance, apply more or less standardized methods to examine different border regions in Europe

Summary

Modelling and benchmarking of borders

Research design for studying development in border areas: case studies towards the big picture?. Méthodologie de recherche sur le développement des zones frontalières: les études de cas peuvent-elles déboucher sur une vision globale?. Electronic reference Sarolta Németh, Ágnes Németh and Virpi Kaisto, « Research design for studying development in border areas: case studies towards the big picture? », Belgeo [Online], 1 | 2013, Online since 31 October 2013, connection on 19 April 2019. This text was automatically generated on 19 April 2019. Belgeo est mis à disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Research design for studying development in border areas: case studies toward

Introduction

Conclusions