Process Tracing – philosophy, theory and practice

The aim of the workshop is to contribute to the expanding methodological literature on qualitative case study methods. Our focus is on process tracing and in-depth case study methods more generally, as well as the role that they can play in multi-method research designs. Witnessing an increasing use of process tracing in empirical research and an increasing body of methodological literature on process tracing and causal mechanisms, we see the need to draw the literature together. At the same time, we need to develop further our knowledge on key aspects of process tracing such as how Bayesian updating can be used as an inferential logic, and when and how process tracing studies can be nested in multi-method research designs. We invite papers that explore the ontological and epistemological foundations of process tracing. Extending the perspective beyond designs that exclusively rely on process tracing, we expect that some papers will deal with the combination of process tracing with other methods in multi-methods designs. Finally, we want to attract empirical case studies that demonstrate process tracing in action and that shed new light on how the promise of this technique can be brought to fruition in the analysis of social phenomena.