Laporte and Ocantos awarded for process tracing article
Jody LaPorte, Gonticas Fellow in Politics and International Relations at Lincoln College, and Ezequiel González Ocantos, Associate Professor in the Qualitative Study of Comparative Political Institutions, have won the 2020 Alexander L George Article Award for their paper, 'Process Tracing and the Problem of Missing Data'.
This award, granted by The American Political Science Association (APSA) Qualitative and Multi Methods Research Section, recognises the best article developing or applying qualitative methods in the preceding year.
In selecting their article, the committee commended it for being 'an insightful, clearly-written guide to mitigating missing data problems when process tracing. Among other excellent points, the article reminds us to consider explicitly the data generation process that yielded the qualitative evidence we use – especially actors’ strategic incentives to hide their actions and/or beliefs, leading to "missingness". The article offers useful ideas for addressing these issues, such as indirect tests of causal mechanisms. For these reasons, the award committee decided unanimously that this article deserved the 2020 Alexander L. George Award.
