Designing Sustainability Research

Research projects in sustainability are complex and transcend the boundaries of conventional disciplines such as economics, international relations, and sociology. Sustainability issues affect and interact with monetary stability, industrial policy, and more; comprise different analytical foci, including human behavior, politics, and power conflicts; and operate across multiple units of analysis such as individuals, groups, organizations, states, and relationships between states. Research designs must integrate distinct components coherently and logically to adequately capture this multi-dimensionality. A good research project has both good ideas and good design. While good ideas can be hard to pin down, a longstanding set of rules and design principles can help us turn compelling ideas into excellent research. Good design makes ideas more accessible, persuasive, and likely to achieve their aims. This course provides students with the fundamental principles for designing research projects in the field of sustainability, including how to link empirical data to concepts, concepts to theory, and theory to research strategy. This includes articulating a problem, question, or research puzzle and providing a rationale for it; reviewing the relevant literature; advancing a hypothesis or argument; constructing a theoretical framework; defining concepts, variables, and relationships; and designing a test of the hypothesis or argument. In order to ground course concepts in real-world examples, we explore current issues in sustainability research through case studies that bring the full array of research design, including cross-sectional, longitudinal, and comparative designs. While our methodological focus is on qualitative approaches, we also look at nested designs that incorporate both qualitative and quantitative analytical tools. By drafting a research design for a sustainability project, justifying their strategy, and examining their work for potential flaws, students improve critical thinking skills, gain further insights through peer and diagnostic review processes, and gain understanding of common research designs in sustainability studies.