Political Science Educator: volume 27, issue 1
Assignments and Course Design
Erica DeBruin, Hamilton College, and Clara Harding, Hamilton College
An essential part of helping students to think like political scientists is teaching them about how research is conducted—including the different sources of evidence scholars use, and the challenges involved in drawing inferences from them. Research that works with archival documents is increasingly accessible for undergraduates as important archival collections are digitized. Such materials can shed unique light on the motivations of important political actors and the internal working of institutions that may be difficult to glean through secondary sources alone.
However, getting started with archival research can also be quite intimidating—it often requires sifting through vast quantities of material and weighing conflicting information. Moreover, using archival materials to test hypotheses in political science can be particularly prone to confirmation bias (Lee 2022). As a result, students can benefit from the opportunity to practice working with archival documents in a controlled context before using them in their own research (Elman, Kapiszewski, and Kirilova 2010).
In this research note, we share reflections on our experience introducing students to working with archival documents in the context of a substantive course on nuclear politics. We describe how we prepared students for archival research, selected documents for them to work with, helped address challenges that they encountered, and had them debrief on the lessons learned.
Preparing students for archival research
In our specific exercise, we asked students to draw upon a set of archival documents that we compiled for them to evaluate competing explanations for the decision-making of American officials in the Berlin Crisis, 1958-1962.[1] The crisis began when the Soviet Union demanded the withdrawal of all armed forces from Berlin. In response, American officials considered a limited nuclear strike against Soviet military targets, but ultimately decided not to pursue it (see Kaplan 2001).
We found that providing students with specific hypotheses to test, rather than asking them to develop an argument inductively from the documents, helped focus the assignment on teaching the research method at hand. Specifically, we had students consider whether American officials were primarily concerned about the potential for Soviet retaliation, the costs and feasibility of using nuclear versus conventional weapons, or moral considerations when deciding against a nuclear strike.[2] We had students work in groups to reduce the grading burden, and so that they could benefit from discussion with one another.
Prior to reading the documents, students were given brief instruction on working with archival materials. We emphasized the need to understand the context of the document (e.g., who wrote the document, when, for what purpose and which audience?). We also encouraged them to focus on specifying the observable implications of competing arguments before diving into the documents. Finally, students were directed to read the archival materials with an eye to compiling evidence that might support or cast doubt on each argument, rather than attempting to “prove” a particular argument was correct.
Selecting documents for students to work with
Selecting a limited set of documents for students to work with helped reduce the potential for students to miss crucial documents or become overwhelmed with the sheer volume of material. We first identified documents by searching for relevant terms (e.g., “nuclear weapons,” “nukes,” “deterrence”) in existing sets of documents on the Berlin Crisis compiled by the National Security Archive and the Foreign Relation of the United States series online.[3] Next, we narrowed those to be used in the exercise down based on their readability and content. We excluded documents that were particularly brief, dense, or that would be difficult to interpret without substantial technical knowledge.
We wanted to ensure students would be able to work with different types of documents (including meeting transcripts, internal memos and briefing papers, correspondence between leaders, and public statements and speeches). At the same time, we sought to include documents that would accurately showcase the wide variety of concerns policymakers raised in their deliberations. In this way, the project was designed to highlight some of the challenges in drawing inferences about motivations from the archival record.
Troubleshooting common challenges
Students were given time to work in their assigned groups in class. This provided us the opportunity to troubleshoot issues as they came up. Students found two aspects of working with archival materials particularly challenging. First, it was not clear to many what the observable implications of a particular argument would be. Some looked for explicit statements about how actors arrived at a particular decision—statements that did not exist in the archival record and, if they did, may not have reflected “true” motivations in any case.
Second, and relatedly, students were confused about how to navigate the conflicting viewpoints in the documents. In particular, students were unsure about how to come to a conclusion about what drove U.S. decision-making, given that there was some evidence potentially consistent with each hypothesis in the set of documents they read. Key advisors to the president held conflicting opinions, appeared to change their minds from one meeting to the next, and typically ended policy discussions without a clear resolution of issues under debate.
While students worked in class, we stopped by each group to help them troubleshoot. In these discussions, we emphasized that their analyses could acknowledge the presence of multiple motivations and discuss the extent of disagreement within the documents. We also reminded students that bringing up a topic is insufficient evidence that it drove decision-making. For example, simply because the president expresses concern about the number of fatalities that could result from the use of nuclear weapons, or how he might be judged for using them, does not mean that this consideration was the most important. Instead, it was important to consider how frequently moral considerations surfaced in discussions, in what context, and how key actors responded. Students reported that these discussions helped them move forward when they felt stuck.
Debriefing lessons learned
Once students had submitted memos summarizing their conclusions about what motivated American decision-making, we dedicated a full class session to debriefing the experience. We first asked students to describe the approach their groups took to the documents and the challenges that they ran into. Almost all reported dividing up responsibility for reading the documents between group members. This approach helped them manage the workload, but also meant they sometimes depended exclusively on one group member’s interpretation of a document when more eyes on it might have been useful. The groups that used the documents most effectively tended to be those that reported extensive debate that forced them all to look over the most important documents again and push themselves to weigh conflicting evidence.
Debriefing was also an opportunity to reiterate the importance of understanding the context of each document, and explaining that context to the reader. As one student emphasized, you need to “know the cast of characters” in order to understand their role in the decision-making process and what their motivations for a particular statement might be. Other students reported realizing, through trial and error, the importance of distinguishing between documents intended for private versus public consumption.
Most impressively, some students noted that the experience of working with archival documents had made them think more critically about how they had approached research in other classes. One recounted, with some chagrin, searching for quotations to support their thesis, rather than attempting to grapple with uncertainty and conflicting evidence. Another student reflected that the exercise had made them realize “how messy” internal policy deliberations can be—and, as a result, shifted their understanding of what constitutes evidence of motivation in the historical record.
Conclusions
Overall, our experience suggested that providing students with a hands-on opportunity to practice working with archival documents is an effective way to illustrate the strengths, limitations, and potential pitfalls of archival research. For our students, the experience highlighted in particular the importance of providing adequate context for evidence drawn from archival material and helped them identify strategies to adjudicate between conflicting information present in the archive. In this way, similar exercises can help students become more savvy consumers of scholarship in the discipline. They can also better equip students to use archival materials in their own research papers and senior theses.
Endnotes
[1] This exercise adapts the “methods lab” approach to teaching students about research methods (Sullivan and De Bruin 2023) for use in a substantive course on nuclear politics.
[2] These three explanations were drawn from course content that students were already familiar with.
[3] Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1961-1963, Volume XIV, 1961-1962, eds. Charles S. Sampson and Glenn W. LaFantasie (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1993); National Security Archive, “Berlin Crisis 1958, 1962,” available at https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/events/berlin-crisis-1958- 1962. The full assignment, including the set of archival documents we compiled, can be accessed at https://www.ericadebruin.com/research.
References
Elman, Colin, Diana Kapiszewski, and Dessislava Kirilova. 2015. “Learning Through Research: Using Data to Train Undergraduates in Qualitative Methods.” PS: Political Science & Politics 48 (1): 39-43.
Kaplan, Fred. 2001. “JFK’s First-Strike Plan.” The Atlantic, October.
Lee, Alexander. 2022. “The Library of Babel: How (and How Not) to Use Archival Sources in Political Science.” Journal of Historical Political Economy 2 (3): 499-526. http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/115.00000038.
Sullivan, Heather, and Erica De Bruin. 2023. “Teaching Undergraduates Research Methods: A ‘Methods Lab’ Approach.” PS: Political Science & Politics 56 (2): 309-314. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096522001366.
Erica De Bruin is an Associate Professor of Government at Hamilton College. Clara Harding is a Research Assistant in the Government Department at Hamilton, where she helped develop the archival document exercise described here, and a graduate of the class of 2023.
Published since 2005, The Political Science Educator is the newsletter of the Political Science Education Section of the American Political Science Association. All issues of the The Political Science Educator can be viewed on APSA Connects Civic Education page.
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