The Qualitative Transparency Deliberations: Insights and Implications

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.1

The Externalization of China's Technical Standardization Approach

“…All local and almost all sectoral standards are voluntary, and the number of mandatory national standards was reduced from more than 10,000 to around 2,000 according to 6. Interviews have been anonymized to protect the identities of our Chinese informants and those of Western standard experts (also see Jacobs et al, 2021).…”

Sources of evidence and openness in field-intensive research on violent conflict

“…This, he argues, would ensure that research findings are supported by the notes. Similar calls lie at the heart of ongoing debates about research openness in political science (Jacobs et al 2021).…”

Qualitative Data Sharing: Participant Understanding, Motivation, and Consent

“…The most common form of shared qualitative data is interview and focus group transcripts, but qualitative data can be shared in a wide range of formats including (but not limited to) images, audio, and audio-visual materials, scanned historical documents, field notes and observations. As requirements for data sharing are becoming more common among funding agencies across the globe and with some journals starting to require data sharing as a condition for the publication of qualitative work, the topic is currently receiving significant attention in a wide range of disciplines (e.g., DuBois et al, 2017;Feldman & Shaw, 2019;Jacobs et al, 2021;Tsai et al, 2016).…”

“…Due to this promise, funding agencies such as the US National Institute for Health (see Mozersky, Walsh, et al, 2020) or the UK's Economic and Social Research Council (see Bishop & Neale, 2011) are increasingly expecting qualitative data resulting from funded research to be shared. As such requirements for data sharing are becoming more common, and with some journals starting to require data sharing as a condition for the publication of qualitative work, the topic is currently receiving significant attention in a wide range of disciplines (e.g., DuBois et al, 2018;Feldman & Shaw, 2019;Jacobs et al, 2021;Tsai et al, 2016).…”