Letter from the editor

At APSA 2007, the section was very active, sponsoring or co-sponsoring nearly 30 panels that were arranged by program officers Dan Slater and Randall Strahan. For APSA 2008, Craig Thomas and Hillel Soifer will serve as the section’s program officers. Please send them your proposals

Letter from the editor

The Qualitative and Multi-Methods Section had another good showing at the APSA convention in Boston. Thanks from the section go to Craig Parsons and Hillel Soifer for organizing an excellent set of panels. Informal impressions from the organizers and others (including myself) were that panels were well attended, even though in some cases we had three panels in the same time slot. Paper proposals were definitely up this year. This is important for the section since the number of proposals is an important part of the formula used by APSA to allocate panels, and is hopefully also a sign of increased research in qualitative methods. Rudy Sil ([email protected]. edu) will be organizing panels for APSA 2009; contact him with your ideas

Schaffer's elucidating social science concepts: Notes of a conceptualist in the field

I am quite sympathetic to many aspects of the anthropological and ethnographic approach defended by Fred Schaffer in his Elucidating Social Science Concepts: An Interpretivist Guide. Much of my methods work is motivated and informed by what I call “methodological anthropology,” which I define as the examination of the practices of social scientists and philosophers regarding concept formation and construction

Necessary Condition Hypotheses in Operations Management

Purpose – To show that necessary condition hypotheses are important in operations management, and to present a consistent methodology for building and testing them. Necessary condition hypotheses (“X is necessary for Y”) express conditions that must be present in order to have a desired outcome (e.g. “success”), and to prevent guaranteed failure. These hypotheses differ fundamentally from the common co-variational hypotheses (“more X results in more Y”) and require another methodology for building and testing them. Design/methodology/approach – Reviewing operations management literature for versions of necessary condition hypotheses. Combining previous theoretical and methodological work into a comprehensive and consistent methodology for building and testing such hypotheses. Findings – Necessary condition statements are common in operations management, but current formulations are not precise, and methods used for building and testing them are not always adequate. Outline of the methodology of Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) consisting of two stepwise methodological approaches, one for building and one for testing necessary conditions. Originality/value – Because necessary condition statements are common in operations management, using methodologies that can build and test such hypotheses contributes to the advancement of operations management research and theory

The Veil of Ignorance Process Tracing (VoiPT) methodology

A central problem in all qualitative and multimethod research is the risk of selection bias and resulting “cherry- picking” in process tracing. What confidence do we have that the researcher is not producing just-so stories, accounts that are biased in favor of the author’s causal story over valid theoretical competitors? Related to this is omitted variable bias, which often goes along with cherry picking. Analysis of observational data deals with this problem through the inclusion of controls. Experiments deal with selection and omitted variable biases via randomization. Process tracing research lacks similar mechanisms for guarding against biased selection of data and variables

Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) Does Exactly What It Should Do When Applied Properly: A Reply to a Comment on NCA

There are two problems with the comment of Thiem about necessary condition analysis (NCA): First, it is based on wrong assumptions about what NCA aims to do. Second, it applies NCA incorrectly. These are critical errors such that the comment’s conclusions about NCA are flawed. Contrary to what the comment states, NCA is a valid method for identifying necessary conditions

Electron‐ion Coulomb scattering and the electron Landau damping of Alfvén waves in the solar wind

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/95528/1/jgra21228.pd

Concepts and Measurement in Multimethod Research

This article argues that concept misformation and conceptual stretching undermine efforts to combine qualitative and quantitative methods in multimethod research (MMR). Two related problems result from the mismatch of qualitatively and quantitatively construed concepts. Mechanism muddling occurs when differences in the connotation of qualitatively and quantitatively construed concepts embed different causal properties into conceptual definitions. Conceptual slippage occurs when qualitatively and quantitatively construed concepts use incompatible nominal, ordinal, or radial scales. Instead of gaining leverage from the synthesis of large- and small-N analysis, these problems can push MMR in two diametrically opposed directions, emphasizing one methodological facet at the cost of the other.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline