Thesis update, 12/19/05

I've been working on my thesis planning since my last post, and thinking of how I need to rework the variables that will be studied in my computer-assisted content analysis of New China News Agency (新華社) articles.

A major change from the last iteration of "the plan" is I am dropping the study of specific issues -- namely, China's territorial dispute with Vietnam in the South China Sea, and issues surrounding Vietnam's treatment of ethnic Chinese. These issues are not only dissimilar to each other, but are also not comparable with country-based content variables like Kampuchea or the Soviet Union. Parsing these variables gets complicated, and I believe will lead to additional questions that lie outside the scope of my original hypotheses.

I am not dropping the idea of employing a methodology that uses NCNA as a barometer of official views of Vietnam, but I am shifting to a different set of variables, and increasing the length of the period under study. The new plan is to concentrate on the main country variable under study, Vietnam, plus two other regional country variables: Kampuchea, and Laos. I will be measuring the correlation between these variables, as well as between superpower variables (Soviet Union/Russia, and the United States) and premier global and regional groupings -- the UN, and ASEAN. (To this end I spent the better part of the weekend building and testing search strings in LexisNexis Academic for all country and regional grouping variables. I'll talk more about this in a separate post -- not only was it an interesting process, but also it revealed significant problems with one variable.)

Additionally, I will extend the period under study from just the Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) era to the Jiang Zemin (江澤民) era as well as Deng. This adds more than 10 years to the timeline, and several thousand additional searches in LexisNexis. Yes, it's a pain, but the results will add an additional basis of comparison which can create many extra opportunities for analysis and insight.

There is a ALM thesis writers' meeting tomorrow, on the 20th, at 51 Brattle Street. I'll see if others at the meeting have any suggestions about my revised approach.