Varieties of Capital Cities
The Competitiveness Challenge for Secondary Capitals
David Kaufmann
Extract
This appendix provides details of the data and methodology used in this book. The backbone of this book consists of 91 semi-structured, in-person interviews with 103 relevant decision-makers and experts in the four SCCs (for a detailed list of the interview partners, see Table A1.1). The selection of interview partners is comparable in all four cases as all of them fall into four broad roles: (1) public officials who serve at various levels of government; (2) local and regional economic development agents; (3) business leaders and private interest groups’ representatives; and (4) experts and academics.
Around 80 percent of the interviews lasted between 40 and 60 minutes. The interviews were realized during nine months of field study in all four cases. I was a guest researcher at Leiden University, Campus The Hague from September to November 2014, at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, National Capital Region from December 2014 to February 2015, and at Ottawa University, Center on Governance from March to May 2015. I took full advantage of the existing contacts and networks to get access to interview partners, data, and documents. I discussed the selection of interview partners and preliminary findings with my local peers. I presented the research framework and preliminary findings in all three academic partner institutions at faculty meetings, lecture series, or brown bag lunches.
The purpose of case studies is to peer into the box of causality. In-depth interviews are therefore one technique to detect causality (Gerring 2007, p....
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