Concepts, context and discourse in a comparative case study.

This paper examines the methodological issues encountered in a comparative case study, which investigated how discourses shaped and legitimated policy maintenance and policy change in Germany before and after unification. The research strategy involved discourse analysis of party political and parliamentary documents, integrating detailed textual and contextual analysis of the institutional framework within which discourses were articulated. The paper examines the possibility of using comparative case studies to develop concepts, and reviews the relationship between concepts and context in qualitative comparative research. A critique is then offered of the process of analysis, ranging from the initial data analysis using NUD*iST, to the re-contextualisation of the textual analysis, and the reintegration of context, theory and textual analysis in writing up the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]