Openness in Practice in Qualitative Research

The discipline of political science has been engaged in discussion about when, why, and how to make scholarship more open for at least three decades.This piece argues that the best way to resolve our differences and develop appropriate norms and guidelines for making different types of qualitative research more open is to move from “if” to “how” – for individual political scientists to make their work more open – generating examples from which we can learn and on which we can build. We begin by articulating a series of principles that underlie our views on openness. We then consider the “state of the debate,” briefly outlining the contours of the scholarship on openness in political and other social sciences, highlighting the fractured nature of the discussion. The heart of the piece considers various strategies, illustrated by exemplary applications, for making qualitative research more open.