Week 6 (10 - 16th Mar 2014)

• Work Finished

1. Visiting Jihetang Coop in Taian City (10 - 12th Mar.);

2. Visiting Wangyuan Milch Cow Coop and Yinong Vegetable Coop in Pingyuan County, and Shihai Table Poultry Breeding Coop in Ling County in Dezhou City.

• Work to Do

1. Summarising the investigation in Henan and Shandong Province.

2. Preparing for the visit to coops in Sichuan Province.

• Questions

First of all, I do case study on a number of typical agricultural cooperatives, through which I generalise the patterns indicating how cooperatives form among smallholders. Based on the patterns, I develop some tentative hypotheses that reflect the correlations and causalities related to the key observable variables (such as the ones I develop in the research design material). Then, I propose a mechanism of forming cooperatives, which can be viewed as the “theory” that this study contributes.

The above is the inductive research section. Next, I do the reductive research in three approaches to confirm (or not) the mechanism (theory). (1) Computer simulation. I create an agent-based model representing the proposed mechanism. I run the model (being calibrated with real data) to observe if the key patterns emerge. (2) Statistical analysis. I conduct statistical analysis on both the simulation data and real data to test the hypotheses, and make comparison between them to further verify the simulation model. (3) Case study. I do case study on different cases used in the inductive research to check if the mechanism and the hypotheses it contains hold.

The equation Coop = α + β*SC + γ*Ep + δ*Ctrl + ε is supposed to be used to do the statistical analysis. Therefore it is design for testing the hypotheses, not for generating the parameter values, which is mainly set based on empirical data -- maybe some parameter values need to be set through regression, but that will be done with regard to that specific equation.