Abstract
In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked serious concern within qualitative research communities and raised fundamental questions about the meaning, value, costs, and intellectual relevance of transparency for qualitative inquiry. In this Perspectives Reflection, we crystallize the central findings of a three-year deliberative process - the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD) - involving hundreds of political scientists in a broad discussion of these issues. Following an overview of the process and the key insights that emerged, we present summaries of the QTD Working Groups' final reports. Drawing on a series of public, online conversations that unfolded at www.qualtd.net, the reports unpack transparency's promise, practicalities, risks, and limitations in relation to different qualitative methodologies, forms of evidence, and research contexts. Taken as a whole, these reports - the full versions of which can be found in the Supplementary Materials - offer practical guidance to scholars designing and implementing qualitative research, and to editors, reviewers, and funders seeking to develop criteria of evaluation that are appropriate - as understood by relevant research communities - to the forms of inquiry being assessed. We dedicate this Reflection to the memory of our coauthor and QTD working group leader Kendra Koivu.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 171-208 |
Number of pages | 38 |
Journal | Perspectives on Politics |
Volume | 19 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Mar 2021 |
Funding
For financial support, we are grateful to the U.S. National Science Foundation under Political Science Program Grant # 1644757 for the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations Interim and Working Group Meetings. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this article are those of the authors or participants in the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Elizabeth Good and Byron Haworth provided outstanding research assistance in the organization of QTD materials and the preparation of this essay; Kathryn Alexander and Elizabeth Good helped with preparing and conducting the APSA 2016 meeting of the QTD working groups; Rob Cooper, Courtney Orning, Stephen Sample, and Josh Smith at Duke University’s Social Science Research Institute and Florian Schmidt at the Hochschule für Politik/School of Governance at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) provided critical IT support for the QTD website and online fora; Alberto Alcaraz provided excellent editorial support for the entire project. The project was made possible by contributions to the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations by hundreds of scholars, ranging in rank from PhD students to emeritus professors.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Political Science and International Relations