Dissertating and Disciplines

Ugh...I'm not gonna subject you all to any more stats nonsense, but let me say that I just got out of class, and I understood virtually nothing in the lecture today. That's always a great feeling. (Ordinal and Multinomial Probit models!!!!)

So, I seem to be drifting toward a research interest in public policies toward children and families. I'm interested in the question of the dispersion of rights and responsibilities for child rearing between the family and the state. And I'm interested particularly in whether structured programs outside of K-12 yield positive externalities for society, and if so, why government has not invested more in early childhood education and youth development programming (other than head start, the majority of these programs are run by private or nonprofit organizations). If these programs don't do anything, there's no reason to believe government would invest in them, but if we assume that K-12 education has positive externalities, isn't it odd that, as soon as kids step outside the walls of their schools, the state says "hey, whatever happens happens! None of our business!" I find this really odd, but apparently, no other policy analysts, political scientists, or labor economists do, because nobody has written shit about it (except for Head Start). There's a mountain of research on K-12 education, but there's very little on other kinds of youth development programs.

So, right now, I'm trying to figure out how to take what is essentially a policy analysis and political philosophy question and turn it into a political science question. I might be making too big of a deal of that problem, but it concerns me, because I want to work in a political science department teaching public policy and American politics. I feel like my dissertation needs to be recognizable as mainstream political science. That means that I need to shoe horn this question into one about political processes (that's really what the empirical side of the discipline does).

If I were going to market myself to public policy/public administrations schools, it would be perfectly fine to just do a straight policy analysis dissertation looking at youth development program outcomes. You might think of this as me saying "I do public policy analysis, and in doing so, I use economics as my disciplinary lens." But I'm not an economist, I'm not trained as an economist, I'm not smart enough to be an economist, and I don't want to be an economist. Insofar as I have one, my disciplinary home is American political science. It makes no sense for me to spend all this time training to think using the constructs, techniques, and jargon of political science if I'm not going to use them.

So, to make this an American politics and policy analysis question instead of an economics and policy analysis question, I have to think in terms of political variables and political theories. I haven't quite figured out how to do that, and I might just have to give up and find another topic. But I'm not quite there yet.