ReproducibiliTea for qualitative researchers

As many of you know, OSCR recently started a ReproducibiliTea journal club (for details on the initiative, see a previous blog post). Seven people attended our first meeting (on November 13th): everyone was interested and engaged, thanks to a cozy and informal environment conducive of open debate… we could not have started in a better way! This nice atmosphere sparked very interesting discussions, one of which is the topic of our next meeting.

The second ReproducibiliTea session will take place on December 11th at 11:00 in room J7-55 (Bayle building). Our discussant Rik Joosen will summarize¹ page 52-62 of a symposium on research transparency and reproducibility from a section of the American Political Science Association on Qualitative and Multi-Method Research:

Buthe, T., Jacobs, A. M., Bleich, E., Pekkanen, R., Trachtenberg, M., Cramer, K., … Fairfield, T. (2015). Transparency in Qualitative and Multi-Method Research: A Symposium (SSRN Scholarly Paper No. ID 2652097). Retrieved from Social Science Research Network website: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2652097

It is a reaction on the adoption of the Data Access and Research Transparency statement (DA-RT) by some major political science journals. The authors discuss potential challenges for qualitative researchers to meet current, often positivistically grounded, transparency standards. The authors highlight issues such as the entangled processes of data collection and data analysis in qualitative research, the different approach to knowledge creation many qualitative researchers take, and ethical concerns. They argue for differentiated research transparency norms that take into account diverse ontological and epistemological backgrounds.

We believe this topic to be of great interest for researchers employing qualitative methods in their daily activities who wish to “open up” their scholarly output. An invitation on the Outlook calendar will soon be sent to researchers in the ReproducibiliTea mailing list (if you want to be included, contact Antonio). Please explicitly Accept or Decline the invitation, so that catering and room capacity can be evaluated accordingly.