Qualitative Transparency Deliberations

From Zehra Arat, UCONN: I have considerable reservations about the QTD effort or what the qualitative researchers are trying to do lately. There seems to be too much push for certain kind of empiricism to make qualitative research as “respectable” and as “rigorous” as the quantitative one. Well, som...

These are great points, pushing us to think about the idea of undue burden on researchers.... I think a bigger question that remains unaddressed is whether or not it is the responsibility of the researcher using archival sources to make all of the sources available. Leaving aside limitations of phot...

Thanks for sharing Tasha. These notes are very helpful in moving the conversation forward. We have an interesting post stream recently started on the comparative/process tracing blog that it quite relevant to the discussion ongoing here and would welcome further comments. I'm taking the liberty of q...

I think your second comment about links for article links up with Rick Valelley's mention of links within articles. I wonder if others agree that this is a good direction to head in, and if so, where these would best be hosted, and what types of guidelines should apply? Or do others disagree with th...

Thanks for these comments Rick. There are some efforts to create data repositories for qualitative data, for example, m. But perhaps something that is hosted on individual websites or online journal formats would make this practice more widespread. What might be some barriers to doing this? Obviousl...

Thanks for sharing this Abbey. I think many of us have been in this same situation, dealing with unorganized archives (or even loads of boxes from a helpful public servant where no archive exists, sometimes even from their personal notes, etc). That is, developing country research usually necessitat...

Hilel, thanks for these thoughts, it is interesting to think about how to define these two terms, and what constitutes a "text." We are really interested in hearing about the different types of text based and non text based sources qualitative researchers use as a means to think about whet...

Marcus, thank you for these comments. Would you say that historians can pick which combination of these three to emphasize at their discretion (that is, when they believe a piece of evidence may point ambiguously to a claim) or is there a standard protocol? Do reviewers push back at manuscripts that...

I agree that citing page numbers is really important and surprisingly not as widespread a practice as it should be, particularly for studies whose inferential leverage is based on text based sources. This is an excellent "low hanging fruit" suggestion to be adopted widely. As reviewers we ...

Sam, thanks so much for these insights. It sounds like the benefits of a transparency appendix from your perspective is self discipline and a more rigorous scholarly product, while the downside is that it may provide reviewers with another reason to nix the paper if they disagree with the interpreta...

Regarding this issue of how to present information about the interview process in a more transparent way (and building on Tasha's comments on this), I have found the book Interview Research in Political Science , editor Lana Mosley to be very helpful, e.g. chapter 4, "How to Report Interview Da...

What are the benefits of increasing transparency for how we obtain our text based and non text based sources, and how we use these sources to make analytical, descriptive or causal claims? What are the costs of increasing transparency for how we obtain our text and non text based sources, and how we...

In your research or publication process, do you use other strategies of promoting transparency or data sharing other than footnotes or endnotes? If so, which ones?