What is an "Ideal-Type" anyway?

I had a similar reaction to Davidson this week while working on my peer review. I found myself reading the article “Bridging and Bonding in Emergency Management Networks,” and trying to find something to criticize in every section. This was difficult as I don’t know much about Emergency Management or the research method used. I found myself looking up everything I didn’t understand in hopes of finding an error to pick on. I am beginning to see that some time spent on the strengths of the paper will help me to present a more balanced and constructive review, rather than a nasty one. After all, as we discussed in class last week, we should only write something that we wouldn’t mind receiving ourselves.

The method used in the paper has proved more challenging to assess than I originally anticipated. It was presented as an “interview” based method, however, there is also the use of ‘ideal-types’ as an analytic approach. I have consequently spent most of my research thus-far in trying to understand what an ‘ideal-type’ is and how they should/are used in research. It has been an interesting concept to research, although I am not yet convinced of its validity as a method. It seems to me to be a very subjective method, as the researcher is the one who determines the “ideal” that the case is being compared to and thus bias must be called into question. For a better explanation of “ideal-type” see http://go.galegroup.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/ps/i.do?action=interpret&id=GALE|CX3439400159&v=2.1&u=utoronto_main&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w&authCount=1… I’m still trying to wrap my head around it.