Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to make explicit the methodological choices at the origin of our research project. The first section comes back to its academic origins. The second describes the design of the comparison. The latter was more oriented to cases rather than variables according to Ragin’s distinction. Our overall research strategy was based on the disconfirmation of a most likely case. We chose a policy—accountability policy—which can be seen as a typical example of education policy promoted by transnational organizations to show that, even in this most likely case, governing changes at work are not unilateral but fundamentally multilevel and depend on the policy trajectory of each system, on a series of mediation processes occurring at various levels, and on the different logics of instrumentation at stake. If these aspects are empirically proven, then it can be argued that it is also true in least likely cases. The third section details the various analytical conventions to be defined throughout the research process (terminology, selection of cases, modes of collaboration within the project). The last two sections deal with the data and material collected through qualitative methods (mainly interviews, observations, and content analyses of documents) and how they were analyzed.
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Notes
- 1.
The papers from this colloquium were published in the volume 4(120) of the French-speaking selective review of political science entitled Politix in 2017.
- 2.
Fabien Desage, interview given to the French embassy in Quebec, October 15, 2014. See: http://www.consulfrance-quebec.org/Si-loin-si-proches-la-comparaison (consulted March 16, 2017).
- 3.
Agence nationale de la recherche (grant number ANR 11 FRQU 001 01).
- 4.
Fonds de recherche du Quebec—Société et Culture (grant number FQRSC 2012-QF-163746).
- 5.
For him, accountability can be defined as “a relationship between an actor and a forum, in which the actor has an obligation to explain and to justify his or her conduct, the forum can pose questions and pass judgment, and the actor may face consequences” (Bovens, 2007, p. 450).
- 6.
All of the SBs contacted were located in the following regions: Capitale-Nationale, Mauricie, Montérégie, Estrie, Lanaudière, Laval, Montréal, Center-du-Quebec, Outaouais, and Laurentides.
- 7.
The Northern SB managers were promoting RBM, and this SB was arguably able to negotiate its implementation well enough (but by no means without tensions, especially in Mountain School) that they were confident in providing us access to their schools. In contrast, the Southern SB seemed less successful at implementing RBM locally. But the Meadow School principal was in the forefront of the “culture change” sought by some Southern SB managers. Still the teachers of this school were fiercely opposed to most of those changes and were eager to talk about them. This probably led the local teachers’ unions to accept our proposal to interview teachers of the Southern SB.
- 8.
The legislative authority in Quebec.
- 9.
We updated this dataset for the purpose of this book. It now includes 722 press dispatches published between March 1998 and June 2017.
- 10.
The articles came from the following publications: L’éducation nationale (1945–1968), L’éducation (1968–1980), Les amis de Sèvres (1949–1988), Courrier de l’éducation (1975–1981), Administration et éducation (1979–2012), L’éducation Hebdo (1980–1982), Cahiers de l’Éducation nationale (1982–1986), Éducation et pédagogies (1989–1993), Éducation et mangement (1989–2009), Nouveaux regards (1994–2012), and Revue internationale d’éducation de Sèvres (1994–2012).
- 11.
Three hundred and thirty-eight for Eastern académie, 345 for Southern académie, and 244 for Western académie, all for the period from April 1998 to April 2015.
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Pons, X., Vaillancourt, S., Maroy, C. (2019). Methodology. In: Maroy, C., Pons, X. (eds) Accountability Policies in Education. Educational Governance Research, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01285-4_4
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