Methods Guide

Use this guide when the hard part is choosing, justifying, or operationalizing a method. The aim is not to pick a label; it is to match your research question, material, and workflow to a defensible analytical path.

Method selection

Match your project to a method

Answer three questions. The result points you to the most relevant section of the methods resource.

What is your main material? What is your main analytical task? How comfortable are you with code?

Recommended section

Corpus planning

If you are unsure, define what you will collect and why. Most method problems become clearer once the corpus, cases, or data source is bounded.

Open Building a Corpus

Browse Method Cards

Workflow

Building a Corpus

Use when the project depends on collecting, bounding, organizing, and documenting a body of texts.

Qualitative

Comparative Case Study

Use when the research question depends on systematic comparison across cases.

Qualitative

Process Tracing

Use when you need to test or reconstruct a causal mechanism within a case.

Qualitative / mixed

Framing Analysis

Use when the project asks how an issue is presented, emphasized, or categorized in texts.

Qualitative

Discourse Analysis

Use when language, identity, power, and meaning-making are central to the claim.

Computational prep

Preprocessing

Use before topic models, sentiment analysis, embeddings, or any reproducible text pipeline.

Computational

Topic Analysis

Use to discover and compare clusters of themes across a larger document collection.

Computational

Sentiment Analysis

Use when the project needs a defensible measure of evaluative tone or affect.

Computational

Word Embeddings

Use when semantic similarity, contextual meaning, or model-based representation matters.

AI & Code

Use when the challenge is source organization, scripting, cleanup, checking, or documenting a workflow.

Other Methods To Consider

These are not covered in depth yet, but may be the right choice depending on the project:

Method	Brief description	Common in
Qualitative interviewing + thematic analysis	Semi-structured interviews analyzed for recurring themes and patterns	All programs, especially fieldwork-based theses
Content analysis	Systematic coding and categorization of textual material; can be quantitative or qualitative	IR, media-adjacent topics
Survey methods / quantitative analysis	Statistical analysis of original or secondary survey data	MAIR especially, BAIS with quantitative focus
Archival research	Systematic analysis of historical documents, government records, correspondence	Korean Studies, history-focused MAAS theses

Qualitative interviewing + thematic analysis

Semi-structured interviews analyzed for recurring themes and patterns.

Common in

All programs, especially fieldwork-based theses.

Content analysis

Systematic coding and categorization of textual material; can be quantitative or qualitative.

Common in

IR, media-adjacent topics.

Survey methods / quantitative analysis

Statistical analysis of original or secondary survey data.

Common in

MAIR especially, BAIS with quantitative focus.

Archival research

Systematic analysis of historical documents, government records, correspondence.

Common in

Korean Studies, history-focused MAAS theses.

For general planning, see Getting Started - Step 4: Building Your Analytical Framework. For assessment, see Assessment Standards - Application of Knowledge.