apsr-research-design

Research Design (apsr-research-design)

APSR accepts many methodologies but is demanding about each. The design must credibly connect the argument (apsr-theory-building) to evidence. This skill is mode-aware: pick the section that matches your work and defend it against the strongest alternative explanation.

When to trigger

• Specifying identification, case selection, or experimental design
• A reviewer questioned causal claims, case choice, external validity, or a confound
• Preparing a pre-analysis plan or a Registered Report Stage 1 design
• Justifying why your design adjudicates the rival account from apsr-literature-positioning

Quantitative / causal inference

• Identification first. State the estimand and the assumptions that license a causal reading (ignorability, parallel trends, exclusion, continuity). Defend them, don't assert them.
• Designs: experiments (incl. survey/conjoint), DID/event study (use modern staggered-adoption estimators, not naive TWFE), IV (first-stage strength, exclusion, weak-IV-robust inference), RDD (density/manipulation tests, bandwidth robustness), matching/weighting with balance + sensitivity.
• Inference: cluster at the level of treatment assignment; randomization inference for experiments; multiple-comparison adjustment when testing many implications.
• Sensitivity: how strong must an unobserved confounder be to overturn the result?

Qualitative / case-based

• Case selection justified by design logic (typical, deviant, most/least-likely, paired comparison) — not convenience. Say what the case is a case of.
• Process tracing with explicit tests (hoop, smoking-gun, straw-in-the-wind); state what evidence would have disconfirmed the argument.
• Source transparency: archives, interviews, fieldnotes — plan how they will be documented and cited (see apsr-transparency-and-data-policy).

Experiments (lab / survey / field)

• Preregister the design and primary analyses; report power/MDE; pre-specify subgroups.
• Address attention/manipulation checks, attrition, and ethics/IRB and consent.
• For survey experiments: sampling frame, treatment realism, and generalization claims.

Formal-empirical linkage

• Make the empirical test follow from the model's comparative statics, not a loose analogy.
• Distinguish predictions that are unique to your model from those shared with rivals.

The adjudication test (APSR-specific)

For the single strongest rival explanation, write one sentence: "If the rival were true rather than my argument, the data would look like ___; instead they look like ___." If you cannot, the design does not yet identify the contribution.

Anti-patterns

• Naive TWFE on staggered treatment; clustering at the wrong level
• "Causal" language on a design that only supports association
• Convenience case selection dressed up as theory-driven
• Conjoint/survey experiments over-generalized to real-world behavior with no caveat
• A design that cannot distinguish your argument from the leading alternative

Output format

【Mode】quant-causal / qualitative / experiment / formal-empirical
【Estimand or claim】what is being identified/shown
【Key assumption(s)】and how each is defended
【Rival ruled out】the adjudication sentence
【Robustness/sensitivity】planned checks
【Next】apsr-data-analysis

Supplementary resources

• ../../resources/external_tools.md — design/identification packages (R/Stata/Python) and CAQDAS for qualitative work
• ../../resources/official-source-map.md — preregistration and Registered Reports notes