Interviews with subject-matter experts and field work play a significant role in my research projects for two reasons. First, most of my projects investigate the impact of technology on state-to-state and state-to-citizen interactions. As a newly emerging topic in which secrecy is often a dominant feature, off- and on-the-record conversations might be the only way to shed light on research questions. Second, as a user/practitioner of a multi-method approach in my research, I use various secondary sources to conduct large-N statistical analysis to create a big-picture answer to my research question and primary sources to provide a nuanced explanation to this answer. For instance, I applied time-series analysis to the newly collected data to explain whether cyber operations can be used as a coercive tool during the Ukrainian conflict. While my research has demonstrated that cyber operations are not (yet) effective as tools of coercion in war, my interviews with cybersecurity subject-matter experts from Russia and Ukraine explain why it is the case. More details on this project can be found here.
I have visited the following twelve countries to conduct field work and interview cybersecurity experts from the public and private sectors, academia, and journalism. These visits motivated my theoretical arguments and established their empirical plausibility.
In addition to conducting interviews while doing my field work, I also use technological advantages to interview experts remotely. For my dissertation, I conducted 64 interviews of cybersecurity experts specializing in 25 countries, between 1 and 9 interviews per country, with a total duration of 43.33 hours. The duration of the interviews was between 15 minutes and 3 hours, with a median of 1 hour and mean of 1.48 hours. I personally conducted all interviews in-person or via Skype or email, to control for potential interviewer effects and maintain consistency across interviews. Some of the interviews that I conducted between 2012 and 2018 were included in peer-reviewed publications and general-audience commentaries. The following is a list of selected works: Publications
Under Review Book Chapters
General Audience Articles
|