Asides

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In-depth interview

Yin (2009, p107) offers useful insight about the use of an in-depth interview during a case study.

“You can ask key  respondents about the facts of a matter as well as their opinions about events.  In some situations, you may even ask the interviewee to propose her or his own  insights into certain occurrences and may use such propositions as the basis  for further inquiry. The “interview” may therefore take place over an extended  period of time, not just a single sitting. The interviewee also can suggest other  persons for you to interview, as well as other sources of evidence.The more that an interviewee assists in this manner, the more that the role  may be considered one of an “informant” rather than a respondent. Key informants are often critical to the success of a case study. Such persons provide the  case study investigator with insights into a matter and also can initiate access to  corroboratory or contrary sources of evidence. …… Of course, you need to be cautious about becoming overly dependent on a key informant, especially because of the interpersonal influence – frequently subtle – that the informant may have over you. A reasonable way of dealing with this pitfall again is to rely on other sources of evidence to corroborate any insight by such informants and to search for contrary evidence as carefully as possible.”

Reference:
YIN, R. K. 2009. Case study research: Design and methods, Sage publications, INC.

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Online QDA

Online QDA is a useful learning resource. It describes itself as “a set of learning materials which address common issues of undertaking qualitative data analysis (QDA) and beginning to use Computer Assisted Qualitative Data AnalysiS (CAQDAS) packages.”
The site contains material consisting of “text pages outlining issues and aspects of analysis and the approaches and theories found in qualitative research along with tutorials with audio and video materials. The Intro section explains how the information and tutorials are arranged and makes some suggestions about how to use this site.”
“The initial development was funded by the UK Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) as part of its Research Methods Programme which aims to improve the standards of research methods across the UK social science community. ESRC GRANT RES-333-25-0009.“

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Viewpoints on project risk

Krane et al. (2012) explore how “Inherent interest conflicts between a project management team and project owner are often neglected in project risk management. Risk management by the project management team basically focuses on project short-term survival, or project success toward handover to the customer, while for the project owner, strategic success should be more important.”

Reference:
KRANE, H. P., OLSSON, N. O. E. & ROLSTADÅS, A. 2012. How project manager–project owner interaction can work within and influence project risk management. Project Management Journal.

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UN Ideas that Changed the World

The useful review by Shaw of UN Ideas that Changed the World (by Richard Jolly, Louis Emmerij and Thomas G. Weiss. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009) also contains useful background on the United Nations Intellectual History Project.

DJ Shaw is a former economic adviser and chief, Policy Affairs Service, UN World Food Programme and consultant to FAO, the World Bank and the Commonwealth Secretariat.

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MyiLibrary

MyiLibrary (get to it via Athens) provides access to collections of books, reports, journals, bulletins and other documents published by inter-governmental organisations such as the World Bank, United Nations and International Labour Organisation. The full text for many of them is available online.

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SciVerse

SciVerse is a toolset by Elsevier that combines ScienceDirect (full text journal articles), Scopus (abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature) and SciTopics (research summaries).