A Renaissance of the "What": Descriptive Research in Social Science

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Session Description

The behavioral turn in Political Science and its emphasis on empiricism were deeply linked with the collection and ownership of data, and the application of empirical methods to that data to yield causal arguments. The Perestroika Movement, in its wake, asserted a qualitative alternative to the statistical approaches associated with behavioralism, but maintained causality as the central goal of social science work. This emphasis has led to a decline in the status of descriptive research in our field, both in publication and in the training of students. The decline can be observed in the decrease in the number of descriptive articles published in major field journals and in the phrasing often accompanying such work as “merely” or “just descriptive.”

Yet as scholars, we know that descriptive research allows for many valuable outcomes: it is vital for conceptualization, measurement and delimitation, it allows for aggregation and comparison of findings, it challenges existing biases or implicit assumptions in the discipline, opens up new questions and modes of inquiry, and allows scholars to examine new cases or instances that have previously been unavailable or thinly analyzed. Rigorous description can give rise to new datasets, in addition to improving existing ones.

Learning to describe well is difficult, even though nearly all scholars across methodological, substantive and epistemological divisions, use description in some capacity. Yet training scholars explicitly for description is less common than training them to make causal inferences or decipher statistical findings.

In Spring and Fall 2022, we convened two workshops titled, “Just Telling it Like it Is: Descriptive Work and Social Science Research.” We used a hybrid format and brought together scholars to discuss where descriptive research fits in Political Science, highlight examples of good descriptive work, and examine its role moving forward. The workshops were generously funded by the Centennial Center and the Special Projects Funds at APSA with additional funding provided by the Cyber Governance and Policy Center at the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

For this roundtable, we are seeking to bring together participants from both workshops, to discuss the role and status of description—as a method, a practice, and a component of research—in their own work, and in the discipline as a whole. The proposed participants in the roundtable represent the substantive and methodological diversity of the discipline, coming from four subfields, using qualitative and quantitative methods, and spanning positivist and interpretivist ontologies in their work. The goal of this roundtable is to broaden and bridge the discussions we had at our two workshops and build on the themes we have discussed: the standards of good description, the contributions of description in both scholarly and public-facing work, and the contributions of description in social scientific research.

Sub Unit

• Division 46: Qualitative Methods

Chair

• Carolyn Ethel Holmes University of Tennessee

Presenters

• Meg K. Guliford Drexel University

• Mary Anne Mendoza California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

• Michelle Jurkovich University of Massachusetts Boston

• Lahoma Thomas Toronto Metropolitan University

• Meghan Garrity George Mason University

• Alesha Porisky Northern Illinois University

• Rebecca Eissler San Francisco State University

• Andrene Wright University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Shareen Hertel University of Connecticut