BOOK, ARTICLE AND PAPER AWARDS

The APSA Organized Section for Qualitative Methods sponsors three annual awards to recognize outstanding new research within the qualitative tradition. This tradition is understood as encompassing the partially overlapping areas of the case study method, small-N analysis, the comparative method, the ethnographic tradition of field research, constructivism and interpretivism, concept analysis, the comparative-historical method, and related work on the logic of inquiry.

The book, article, and conference paper awards will all encompass two types of contributions: new research on methodology per se, i.e., studies that introduce specific methodological innovations or that synthesize and integrate methodological ideas in a way that is in itself a methodological contribution; and substantive work that is an exemplar for the application of qualitative methods.

1. Giovanni Sartori Book Award. This award honors Giovanni Sartori's work on qualitative methods and concept formation, and especially his contribution to helping scholars think about problems of context as they refine concepts and apply them to new spatial and temporal settings. This award may be granted to a single-authored or multi-authored book, or to an edited volume.

2. Alexander L. George Article Award. This award honors Alexander George's contributions to the comparative case-study method, including his work linking that method to a systematic concern with research design, and his contribution of developing the idea and the practice of process tracing. This award may be granted to a journal article or to a chapter in an edited volume that stands on its own as an article.

3. Sage Paper Award. This award honors Sara and George McCune, who founded and sustained Sage Publications as a leading publisher of social science methodology -- including very centrally qualitative methods. This award will be given to a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.

The awards will be given to works published, or to papers given, in the calendar year prior to the year of the APSA meeting at which the awards are presented. The copyright date of a book, or the formal publication date of a journal, will establish the relevant year. The award committees will be appointed each year by the President of the Qualitative Methods section, in consultation with the Section Executive Committee.