Toolbox

Drought Mitigation

Methods used

Comparative case study analysisQualitative comparative analysis

Critical grounded theoryRetroduction

Research focus & objectives

The research focus of this project is rainwater harvesting for irrigation (RWHI) in Kenya with the objective of identifying cultural, political and economic factors that contribute to an enabling environment for the adoption and scaling of RWHI

Methods applied

Comparative case study analysisQualitative comparative analysis

Critical grounded theoryRetroduction

Critical grounded theory (Charmaz, 2017)
Comparative case study (Flyvberg, 2006; Yin, 2014; Bartlett and Vavrus, 2017)
Qualitative research (Merriam, 2002; Starman, 2013)
Retroduction (Belfrage and Hauf, 2017)

Analytical tools & literature

Thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006)
Process tracing (Bennett and Checkel, 2014)

Reflections and recommendations by the researcher

Keep a close record on the decisions you make on the methodology, changes in methods, insights on the methods, and results. This will help you trace your thinking process over the course of the research, and provide justification for conducting the research in a certain way. Closely following the recommended steps in a methodology will help avoid confusion and messiness down the line, even if it takes more time.

Researcher

Radhika Singh

Radhika Singh is PhD researcher based at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, and also an Early Stage Researcher with the EU-funded training network NEWAVE. She is a social scientist by training and in her research she applies the lens of system transformation to understand how enabling environments can be formed for the adoption and scaling of sustainable technologies. Based in Kenya, she has also conducted research in Israel, India, Thailand, the Philippines, and Ethiopia.