From conceptual misalignment to reconceptualizing:demonstrating the process of reconceptualization

In collecting data, analyzing data, or writing up, researchers can find that the concepts they had decided to use and the available concepts in the literature are mismatched with what they seek to explore and/or explain. This misalignment between concepts and observations can create analytical and theoretical blind spots, foreclosing the opportunity to delve deeper into and articulate the specificities and complexities of what they observe. Researchers experiencing such misalignment of concepts need strategies to help them reconceptualize existing concepts, which we hope to provide here to help researchers develop more nuanced and better-adapted concepts that provide more analytical, theoretical, and empirical leverage. This article suggests a four-step process of reconceptualization, a method for developing and iterating the concepts we employ in designing, conducting, and writing up research. This method of reconceptualization addresses a gap in the existing literature on concepts by providing a new, practical, accessible, and pedagogically oriented solution for this problem of misaligned concepts. We illustrate how to implement reconceptualization by working with the concept of “local” and offer two examples of how we reconceptualized this concept in two projects in Dominica and Moldova. We show how, by reconceptualizing an initial concept, we can move forward in developing new and reconceptualized concepts. Hence, this article also offers two concepts: “local-international” and “internationalized local,” that are more attuned to what we observe and richer in their empirical and analytical potential.