Support for Institutes and Research Groups on Qualitative and Multi-Method Research

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The primary mission of the Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research is the training of graduate students and junior faculty in advanced qualitative methods. The Institute plays the same role vis-a-vis the qualitative/multimethod field as the ICPSR summer school at the University of Michigan plays for quantitative/statistical work: providing a high level of carefully designed instruction for a large number of students, drawn from a wide national constituency. Like ICPSR, the Institute has a large impact on the level of methodological training in the political science discipline.The Institute has added to its program a Research Group in Qualitative and Multi-Method Analysis. The Research Group meets during the two-day breakbetween the two sessions of the regular training Institute. The goal of the Research Group is to help younger scholars to step into the role of publishing actively in the field of methodology, thereby adding to the core canon of published research on which the wider academic community can draw. The aim is for the contribution of the Research Group to parallel that of the summer meetings of the Political Methodology Society, at which both senior and junior-level scholars present innovative research on methodology.The Institute and its associated Research Group have thus evolved to the point of playing a twofold role in the field of qualitative and multi-method research, thereby sustaining both advanced training, and the promotion of new methodological research, parallel to that in the quantitative/statistical side of political methodology.The methodological goals in promoting this training and advanced research are quite specific. Priority is currently being given to four areas that will yield major gains in the analytic tools available for practicing researchers: 1. Innovative work is now being done linking familiar ideas about typologies to new debates on conceptualization and measurement-thereby moving methodologists well beyond the idea that typologies are merely a "traditional," and possibly quite out-of-date, analytic tool. 2. New work is needed to establish rigorous standards for the practice of "process tracing," and for assessing its contributions to causal inference-thereby moving the field to more productively use a method that lies at the core of qualitative research. 3. Qualitative researchers need to think hard about issues of case selection and establishing criteria for generalization-a challenge that is addressed in new work on establishing scope conditions, forming concepts appropriate to a given scope of analysis, and case selection. 4. The self-conscious construction of composite research designs that employ multiple, complementary methods-an area that requires concerted new attention that will move the field beyond the idea of "multi-method" as a slogan, rather than as a set of rigorous norms for research.Through advancing this four-fold methodological agenda, the Institute conveys valuable new methodological understandings to the large constituency that receives the general training at ASU, and challenges a new generation of scholars who participate in the Research Group to advance the field in productive directions.