Interpretive Analysis and Comparative Research

Abstract

Imagine a comparative analysis of primary school breakfast programmes, an undertaking of different states’ health agency policies intended to make more nutritional food available to young children whose families cannot afford it. All schools serve dry cornflakes with milk for breakfast. Informed by a model of comparative research that begins with naming and defining concepts, operationalizing them as variables, and hypothesizing relationships among dependent and independent variables before going to the field to test those hypotheses, you select your cases. In keeping with the positivist ontological and epistemological presuppositions underlying that model, you then assess the number of bowls of cereal consumed per day, by school type (public, church- sponsored) and/or location (city, town, rural), perhaps with additional independent variables thrown in for good measure. Your findings show some correlation between cornflake consumption and, say, children’s height, weight, and grades, varying by type of school and rural-urban location, leading you to recommend particular courses of action intended to improve protein intake.