RELOCAL Workshop in Dortmund

The Dortmund Workshop was the first step before launching pilot empirical work and testing the Manual for Case Study Research in practice.

RELOCAL partners, in charge on pilot case studies, met together in Dortmund for a two-day session, focusing on the orientations and guidelines on how tackle the research phases of the pilot cases studies. The internal workshop was dedicated to choice pilot cases, and the finalisation of the case study manual concerning how issues are to be researched and documented, and what the overarching goals are and how they are operationalized.

First day the discussions was about the Manual for Case Study Research, with the aim of finding out if the Manual was precise enough, if it was self-evident what everyone needs to do or if it needed to some clarifications that everyone can start fieldwork.  The main purpose of the manual is to guide empirical case study research in the RELOCAL project. Particularly, it aims to ensure that the case studies are carried out in the best way to answer the overall project research questions and to enable a systematic and comparative analysis across cases. The second day meeting were decided the pilot cases study proposals. Among large variety of intriguing 33 cases across Europe, which will have to be analysed during the project, RELOCAL team have developed a two-step procedure to selected the appropriate cases. The first phase is the so-called “pilot phase” where eight case are analysed: these pilot have been suggested on the basis of the main ambitions of the project, as well as the local knowledge of the partners responsible for the empirical case study work. To “test” the fieldwork methodology, these eight pilots (out of the 33) have been selected during the Dortmund meeting.

The fieldwork in the pilot cases starts in October 2017 and the results will be looking forward after 5 months. The second phase will begin in spring 2018 with the remaining 25 cases, following the Barcelona meeting, which will take place next February.