Colin Elman

Openness in political science: Data access and research transparency

In 2012, the American Political Science Association (APSA) Council adopted new policies guiding data access and research transparency in political science. The policies appear as a revision to APSAs Guide to Professional Ethics in Political Science. The revisions were the product of an extended and broad consultation with a variety of APSA committees and the associations membership.

Data access and research transparency in the qualitative tradition

As an abstract idea, openness is difficult to oppose. Social scientists from every research tradition agree that scholars cannot just assert their conclusions, but must also share their evidentiary basis and explain how they were reached. Yet practice has not always followed this principle. Most forms of qualitative empirical inquiry have taken a minimalist approach to openness, providing only limited information about the research process, and little or no access to the data underpinning findings. What scholars do when conducting research, how they generate data, and how they make interpretations or draw inferences on the basis of those data, are rarely addressed at length in their published research. Even in book-length monographs which have an extended preface and footnotes, it can sometimes take considerable detective work to piece together a picture of how authors arrived at their conclusions.

Qualitative Data Archiving: Rewards and Challenges

Political science has witnessed a renaissance in qualitative research methods (Bennett and Elman 2006 ). Over the last 15 years, the canon has been reworked to systematize and expand the repertoire of qualitative methods, ground them more firmly in contemporary philosophy of science, and illuminate their strengths relative to quantitative and formal methods (Bennett and Elman 2007 ). A rapidly expanding body of political science research now employs qualitative and multi-method analysis, and institutions dedicated to qualitative and multi-method research have flourished.

Case Study Research: Putting the Quant Into the Qual

Case studies are usually considered a qualitative method. However, some aspects of case study research—notably, the selection of cases—may be viewed through a quantitative template. In this symposium, we invite authors to contemplate the ways in which case study research might be conceived, and improved, by applying lessons from large-n cross-case research.

Duck-Rabbits in Social Analysis A Tale of Two Cultures

This article differentiates between three approaches to methodological diversity: monism, pluralism, and eclecticism. It suggests that in advancing a set-theoretic understanding of qualitative research, A Tale of Two Cultures makes an unusually strong argument for robust pluralism. The article anticipates three types of critiques that are likely to be made of the book: Monists will argue that pluralism is an illusion; quantitative researchers will suggest that Goertz and Mahoney inaccurately describe quantitative methods; and qualitative researchers will express doubts as to whether their tradition can be best understood using set theory. The article mainly focuses on the third of these responses, and suggests that even if A Tale of Two Cultures is not always convincing as a descriptive account of current practices, it holds considerable promise as a prescriptive agenda.

Qualitative Data Sharing: Data Repositories and Academic Libraries as Key Partners in Addressing Challenges

Data sharing is increasingly perceived to be beneficial to knowledge production, and is therefore increasingly required by federal funding agencies, private funders, and journals. As qualitative researchers are faced with new expectations to share their data, data repositories and academic libraries are working to address the specific challenges of qualitative research data. This article describes how data repositories and academic libraries can partner with researchers to support three challenges associated with qualitative data sharing: (1) obtaining informed consent from participants for data sharing and scholarly reuse, (2) ensuring that qualitative data are legally and ethically shared, and (3) sharing data that cannot be deidentified. This article also describes three continuing challenges of qualitative data sharing that data repositories and academic libraries cannot specifically address—research using qualitative big data, copyright concerns, and risk of decontextualization. While data repositories and academic libraries cannot provide easy solutions to these three continuing challenges, they can partner with researchers and connect them with other relevant specialists to examine these challenges. Ultimately, this article suggests that data repositories and academic libraries can help researchers address some of the challenges associated with ethical and lawful qualitative data sharing.

Security Studies, Security Studies, and Recent Developments in Qualitative and Multi-Method Research

Research traditions are essential to social science. While individuals make findings, scholarly communities make progress. When researchers use common methods and shared data to answer mutual questions, the whole is very much more than the sum of the parts. Notwithstanding these indispensable synergies, however, the very stability that makes meaningful intersubjective discourse possible can also cause scholars to focus inward on their own tradition and miss opportunities arising in other subfields and disciplines. Deliberate engagement between otherwise distinct networks can help overcome this tendency and allow scholars to notice useful developments occurring in other strands of social science. It was with this possibility in mind that we, the Forum editors, decided to convene a workshop to connect two different and only partially overlapping networks: the qualitative strand of the security subfield and scholars associated with the qualitative and multi-method research project. The qualitative strand of the security subfield, most notably in the pages of this journal and in International Security, typically follows traditional forms of historical analysis. Scholars usually collect qualitative data, engage in small-n comparisons and/or within-case analyses, and make descriptive and causal inferences based on that combination of evidence and analysis. With some minor updating in citations aside, this tradition has remained unchanged for twenty or more years. By way of illustration, the issues of Security Studies from 2012, 2013, and 2014 contained seventy-three articles, of which thirty could be characterized as offering evidence-based analysis, with a (sometimes implicit) research design, data, and conclusions. Of these

Research cycles: Adding more substance to the Spin

In sciences such as biomedicine, researchers and journal editors are well aware that progress in answering difficult questions generally requires movement through a research cycle: Research on a topic or problem progresses from pure description, through correlational analyses and natural experiments, to phased randomized controlled trials (RCTs). In biomedical research all of these research activities are valued and find publication outlets in major journals. In political science, however, a growing emphasis on valid causal inference has led to the suppression of work early in the research cycle. The result of a potentially myopic emphasis on just one aspect of the cycle reduces incentives for discovery of new types of political phenomena, and more careful, efficient, transparent, and ethical research practices. Political science should recognize the significance of the research cycle and develop distinct criteria to evaluate work at each of its stages.