CALL FOR PARTICIPATION: INTERIM REPORT AT APSA 2016

The APSA Organized Section on Qualitative and Multi-Method Research is sponsoring the “Qualitative Transparency Deliberations” (QTD), an online deliberative process at https://www.qualtd.net, in which all APSA members are invited to participate. While motivated by the lively current discussions about “data access and research transparency,” these deliberations are neither an anti–DA-RT effort, nor an attempt to “make DA-RT work” for different qualitative research transitions. Rather, building on the symposium on transparency in the spring 2015 issue of Qualitative and Multi-Method Research (http://ssrn.com/abstract=2652097), the QTD platform is designed to ensure an inclusive, transparent, and mostly bottom-up process for deliberations over the meaning, costs, benefits, and practicalities of research transparency, broadly understood.

The QTD process, approved by more than 97% of the QMMR section membership in an online vote, seeks to identify our understandings of research transparency in ways that allow for the possibility that they may differ substantially across approaches, research context, or specific empirical methods. It also seeks to advance political scientists’ understanding of the costs/risks, benefits, and practicalities of research transparency in a differentiated manner, with due attention to the primacy of ethical obligations such as human subjects protection, and based on a broad understanding of “qualitative transparency” as explicitness about all aspects of our research that are neither strictly statistical/econometric nor experimental (including, for instance, issues of conceptualization and measurement that underpin quantitative datasets). It aims to inform new and ongoing research, graduate training, as well as reviewers and editors by identifying current best practices while also encouraging innovation.

During the first stage of the QTD process, launched in early April, everyone was invited to help shape the QTD agenda by identifying questions, dilemmas, practices, and concerns that merit discussion and examination. Stage 1 took the form of at-large online deliberations on the QTD discussion board, hosted by Duke University’s Social Science Research Institute and moderated by a Steering Committee appointed by QMMR Section president Peter Hall (Harvard University). It is cochaired by Tim Büthe (Duke University) and Alan M. Jacobs (University of British Columbia) and consists of Andrew Bennett (Georgetown University), Erik Bleich (Middlebury College), Mary Hawkesworth (Rutgers University), Kimberley S. Johnson (Barnard College), Kimberly J. Morgan (George Washington University), Sarah E. Parkinson (University of Minnesota), Edward Schatz (University of Toronto), and Deborah J. Yashar (Princeton University).

As of May 25, the QTD platform had 241 registered users who contributed 230 posts to the discussion boards. In addition, nonregistered visitors provided 98 anonymous posts for a total of 328 posts during the at-large deliberations (stage 1). Informed by this input, the QTD Steering Committee has established working groups for distinct research contexts, qualitative empirical methods that result in differing concerns, and some cross-cutting issues. These working groups will lead the differentiated substantive deliberations during stage 2. Each group will seek input in various ways, including welcoming unsolicited emails or posts to each working group’s separate discussion board on www.qualtd.net.

The Steering Committee encourages posting “on the record” by registering on the QTD website and then logging in before posting, but the discussion boards also allow anonymous participation by posting without logging in. Input from junior scholars and graduate students is particularly welcome!

The Steering Committee will give an Interim Report at the 2016 APSA Meeting on a Theme Panel Roundtable on Thursday, September 1, 10:00–11:30 a.m.

POLITICS

Politics Symposium: 2016 Elections Forecasts

James E. Campbell, guest editor

More than a Game: Football Fans and Marriage Equality

Melissa R. Michelson and Brian F. Harrison

I Will Register and Vote, if You Teach Me How: A Field Experiment Testing Voter Registration in College Classrooms

Elizabeth A. Bennion and David Warwick Nickerson

Correct Voting and Post-Election Regret

André Blais and Anja Killibarda

THE PROFESSION

Reducing Political Bias in Political Science Estimates

Lawrence James Zigerell

From the Sections: Watching Elections 2016 with a Gender Lens

Kelly Dittmar

THE TEACHER

Campaign Simulation for American Government: An Active Learning Approach to Campaigns and Elections

Gayle Alberda

AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION ANNOUNCES THEME: “HISTORICAL SCALE: LINKING LEVELS OF EXPERIENCE”

Historians focus their research and teaching on selected levels of experience: they portray microhistory, global history, regional history, or oceanic history. For the 2017 annual meeting, contributors are encouraged to trace links among scales—spatial, temporal, and topical. The focus of the 2017 program on linking historical scales provides one way to seek coherence in the ever-widening range of historical study. Such exploration of scale in history, though timely, is hardly new. Thus, in the days of preeminence of national histories, it was not uncommon for historians to recount the national experience through local or provincial narratives. But in 2017, we hope to push the boundaries of scalar analysis, developing practice and language by which researchers and students may describe links from the specific to the general or the other way around.

The purpose of studying historical scale today is not so much to perfect national narratives as to develop insights into historical connections. The notion of “scale” refers most obviously to geographic space but also to time, topic, and perhaps other dimensions. In linking spatial scales, one sees, for example, how worldwide decolonization and the specifics of the Algerian struggle for independence each brought changes to the other. The contemporaneous rise of Protestantism and Safavid Shi’ism each drew on yet inflected, respectively, the long-term trajectory of Christianity and Islam. For music, the sounds and orchestration of each tradition are of interest in themselves, yet music is also influenced by the social order it inhabits, while musical messages affect adjoining arts and sometimes set the tone for large-scale social change.

The possible links among historical scales are immense in number. One may hope to locate an occasional nexus of specific historical factors that combine to bring about change, even if they are at quite different scales. Juxtaposition and interaction of small and large geographical terrains, short and long periods of time, specific topics and wide-ranging topical scope—these are proposed as an underlying theme in addition to the many specific subjects of panels on research and teaching. Overall, it may be that eclectic links of papers and panels throughout the conference will reveal links across the scales of history, documenting the interdependence of historians working in various specializations.

Registration for the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association (hosted in Denver, Colorado, January 5–8) will open mid-September.

2017 PROGRAM CHAIRS

Anand A. Yang, University of Washington, Seattle, 2017 chair

Edda L. Fields-Black, Carnegie Mellon University, 2017 cochair.