Confronta i metodi

	Witness Reliability Triangulation	Historical Process Tracing
Campo	Historiography	Historical Institutionalism
Famiglia	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Anno di origine	1970	2005
Ideatore	Classical source-critical tradition; formalized via triangulation in social science	Alexander George and Andrew Bennett
Tipo	qualitative evidential method	causal-framework
Fonte seminale	Howell, M., & Prevenier, W. (2001). From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods. Cornell University Press. ISBN: 9780801485602	George, A. L., & Bennett, A. (2005). Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences. MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262572224
Alias	Source Triangulation, Corroboration Analysis, Testimony Cross-Checking, Convergence of Evidence	Causal-process tracing, Within-case mechanism tracing, Historical mechanism analysis, Causal-process observation method
Correlati	4	3
Sintesi	Witness reliability triangulation is the procedure by which a historian combines several testimonies about the same event to reach a justified conclusion about what happened. It rests on a simple but powerful logic: a single account, however vivid, may be mistaken or self-serving, but when independent sources that could not have colluded converge on the same point, the probability that they are all wrong in the same way becomes small. The method, descended from the classical source-critical tradition and sharpened by the social-scientific concept of triangulation associated with Donald Campbell and Norman Denzin, requires the historian to inventory the available testimonies, assess each one's reliability and bias through internal criticism, establish whether the sources are genuinely independent, and then treat their agreement as corroboration while explaining their disagreements. The same Bayesian intuition underlies the use of multiple, independent evidentiary streams in process-tracing case analysis. Triangulation is how disparate, fallible sources are turned into defensible historical knowledge.	Historical process tracing is a within-case method for establishing causation by following a hypothesized mechanism step by step through the sequence of events that links a cause to an outcome. Systematized for the social sciences by Alexander George and Andrew Bennett and refined by James Mahoney, the approach treats history not as a source of correlations across cases but as a chain of intervening steps whose presence or absence can confirm or refute rival explanations. Instead of asking whether a cause covaries with an outcome across many units, process tracing asks whether the connecting mechanism actually operated in the case at hand, examining diagnostic pieces of evidence, causal-process observations, against the predictions of competing hypotheses. Drawing on the logic of Bayesian updating and on tests such as the hoop test and the smoking-gun test, it offers a disciplined way to leverage rich qualitative detail for strong causal inference in single cases and small comparisons typical of historical institutionalism.