ABSTRACT

To describe and understand the development of welfare states, it is necessary to know how to analyse this development. This chapter describes some of the main quantitative and qualitative approaches. Rather than describing in detail how to conduct the different kinds of analyses (for this, see Chapter 29), this chapter focuses on the available approaches. In this chapter, I discuss three broad categories of approaches: quantitative, comparative

qualitative, and single case studies, focusing on the most important methods available and illustrating each with one or two examples. This overview indicates that which approach is ‘best’ depends on the researcher’s research question and goal.