Institutional researchers are often tasked with assessing why college-wide initiatives succeed or fail. This can be a difficult task: researchers need to discriminate between multiple feasible explanations, work with limited data, and produce compelling narratives. Process tracing is a qualitative methodology that enables researchers to make valid inferences in such circumstances. Process tracing focuses the researcher’s attention on the sequence connecting cause and effect. It involves articulating a working theory, generating hypotheses, collecting data, assessing competing hypotheses, revising theory, and producing a narrative connecting cause and effect. This paper describes how to use process tracing for institutional research. It begins by summarizing key concepts, uses a simulated case study to give a brief overview of process tracing, discusses the importance of evidence and transparency in implementing the method, and concludes with a summary of the benefits of process tracing.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.