Design record · Spring 2026

Classroom studies

The course used several forms of classroom inquiry. This page records the design of each activity and explains what can be learned from it. Randomized experiments, descriptive surveys and discussion exercises warrant different conclusions.

Randomized experiments: Weeks 2–4
Descriptive surveys: Weeks 10 and 12
Structured exercise: Week 11

Why use classroom inquiry?

International relations makes claims about how people perceive risk and define their interests or identities. A classroom study makes some of those claims easier to inspect. Students see how a hypothesis becomes a treatment and how an abstract concept becomes a measure. They also learn why evidence may be inconclusive or run against the hypothesis.

The studies serve a pedagogical purpose. They are classroom activities with a voluntary convenience group from one course rather than preregistered population studies. Random assignment can make the comparison informative within that group. It cannot make the class representative of a wider population.

Three kinds of evidence

Experiment

Participants are assigned to different materials before answering the same outcome questions. The comparison concerns the materials as implemented and remains subject to limits in sample size or implementation.

Survey

All participants receive the same questions. The results describe the participating group. They identify no causal effect and provide no population estimate.

Exercise

A show of hands or discussion prompt structures collective reasoning. It produces no result dataset unless responses are recorded.

Week 2 · Randomized survey experiment

Framing U.S.–China cooperation

Question

Does a Hobbesian rivalry brief or a Lockean cooperation brief change expectations about whether the United States and China can cooperate?

Conditions

Participants received either a rivalry-oriented analyst brief or a cooperation-oriented one. The implemented control received no analyst brief. This corrects the earlier site's inaccurate description of the control as a neutral “snapshot” vignette.

Outcome

Five 1–5 items formed a Cooperation Perception Score after two items were reverse-coded. Higher scores represented more optimism about cooperation.

What it teaches

The activity shows how theoretical language becomes a treatment and why a multi-item scale requires coding decisions. A predicted ordering does not itself constitute a reliable effect.

The briefs contain different claims and examples, so the design tests each narrative as a whole. Any summary of the study should state that the substantive content changed along with the wording.

Week 3 · Randomized survey experiment

Framing nuclear safety

Question

Does emphasizing deterrence and stability, danger and near-misses, or a descriptive overview change assessments of whether nuclear weapons stabilize international politics?

Conditions

The Stability vignette centered on deterrence and the long peace. The Danger vignette discussed accidents and false alarms as well as the erosion of arms control. A third condition received a descriptive Control vignette.

Outcome

Five 1–5 items formed a Nuclear Safety Perception Score after two items were reverse-coded. Higher scores represented a more stabilizing assessment.

What it teaches

The activity translates the Waltz–Sagan debate into competing expectations. It also requires students to distinguish arguments supplied in the treatment from claims supported by the comparison.

The vignettes supply arguments for participants to assess. The survey does not establish those arguments as facts, and this site makes no causal claim about the realized student comparison.

Week 4 · Randomized survey experiment

Historical analogies and strategic advice

Question

Does a European balance-of-power analogy or an Asian institutional-engagement analogy change recommendations for smaller states facing a fictional rising power?

Conditions

Participants received a European historical brief, an Asian historical brief or a control scenario without either analogy.

Outcome

Five 1–5 items formed an Engagement Orientation Score after two items were reverse-coded. Higher scores represented more engagement-oriented advice.

What it teaches

The activity examines how historical experience enters strategic reasoning. It also asks whether the instrument reproduces the regional simplifications that scholars of Global IR question.

Historical analogy is one of several differences between the vignettes. Their substantive content also changes, and the control contains additional facts. The exercise therefore compares complete briefs.

Week 10 · Descriptive classroom survey

Criteria of national membership

Question

Which criteria do participants consider important for being “truly” part of a nation? How do those criteria relate to ethnic, civic and voluntarist conceptions of membership?

Instrument

The survey measured citizen preference and included an eight-item membership battery. It covered birth and ancestry, citizenship and residence, language, religion, respect for institutions and felt membership. Background questions and optional feedback completed the instrument.

Comparison

The analysis workflow compared selected items with weighted ISSP 2023 benchmarks for four countries. These were descriptive comparisons, and some classroom items lacked a directly comparable benchmark.

What it teaches

The activity translates abstract definitions of nationalism into measurement choices. It also distinguishes a descriptive classroom pattern from a representative country estimate.

Week 11 · Structured exercise

Diagnosing the globalization trilemma

Question

Which corner of Rodrik's trilemma was constrained in five political-economic cases? The possible answers were deep globalization, national sovereignty and democratic politics.

Cases

Greece, Brexit, China, the United States under Trump, and Argentina.

Format

Students voted by show of hands before the lecture worked through each diagnosis.

Evidence status

No vote tally or participant count was recorded. Expected splits in the speaker notes guided the discussion and should not be treated as classroom findings.

Week 12 · Descriptive survey and course review

The Anthropocene and global futures

Question

How do participants understand the Anthropocene and assess whether IR and sovereignty are adequate to it? The survey also asked about ecological conflict, future priorities and the course itself.

Instrument

The instrument included a concept check and five agreement items. It also contained one future-priority choice, five usefulness ratings and an optional open-text question.

Implementation note

An earlier draft proposed a ranking of five future forces. The fielded instrument used a single-choice priority item.

What it teaches

Formative assessment and course review can share an instrument even though neither component constitutes an experiment.

Open-text feedback remains private. The fielded activity was a non-randomized survey. An earlier placeholder page incorrectly described a proposed framing experiment as though it had been run.

Interpretation rules

Call a study an experiment only when an implemented assignment mechanism created comparison conditions.
Describe the treatment that was actually fielded, including a no-brief control or bundled differences between vignettes.
Separate hypotheses and claims made in the treatment from findings. A null or reversed result can still serve the pedagogical purpose.
Do not generalize a voluntary classroom group to a population.
Keep student-level responses, identifying fields, and open-text feedback out of the public repository.