Policy-Capturing - State of the art and implications for governance research

In the following, I will give a short outline of the content of the thesis at hand.
As my topic deals with the application of Policy-Capturing (PC) studies in governance
research, I will first address both terms – the PC technique and a definition of governance decisions – separately and then combine the explanations into a superordinate context.
Chapter 5 attends to the typical steps a PC study consists of and describes representative questions and decisions researchers have to consider at every stage of their research, namely study design, study execution,
analysis, interpreting results and reporting results.
Subsequently, I will describe my process of finding suitable articles and give a brief survey of the PC studies dealing with governance decisions as well as those from other areas of research which I reviewed and analyzed.
The following section covers obstacles that researchers conducting a PC study may frequently be confronted with, offers solutions on how to overcome those hurdles in case of occurrence and provides the reader with guidelines that should be adhered to in order to enhance the study’s design and execution as well as the results’ analysis, interpretation and reporting.
Having covered PC in extenso, the next chapter discusses conjoint analysis as a closely related technique highlighting conspicuous parallels to PC and giving some advice scholars employing PC could also
benefit from.
I end my thesis with a conclusion, summing up the most important and most interesting findings and giving a brief outlook on the future of the application of PC studies in governance research.