Dr Jody LaPorte wins best article award from the American Political Science Association

Congratulations to Lincoln's Dr Jody LaPorte (Gonticas Fellow in Politics and International Relations) and Dr Ezequiel Gonzalez-Ocantos (Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations), who have been awarded the 2020 Alexander L. George Award by the American Political Science Association for their article 'Process Tracing and the Problem of Missing Data'.  This award, granted by APSA's Qualitative and Multi Methods Research Section, recognises the best article developing or applying qualitative methods in the preceding year.

Their article, forthcoming in Sociological Methods and Research, develops practical tools and techniques for overcoming missing data in qualitative research. 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, e.g. indirect tests of causal mechanisms. For these reasons, the award committee decided unanimously that this article richly deserves the 2020 Alexander L. George Award.'