Tasha Fairfield holds a Ph.D in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. Her comparative politics research analyzes the political economy of inequality, the politics of policy formulation, and business-state relations in Latin America. Her methodological research examines the Bayesian logic of inference in qualitative social science.

Katya Drozdova is an associate professor of political science in the School of Business, Government, and Economics at Seattle Pacific University. Dr. Drozdova used information theory to lay out a systematic

Anna Zelenz is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science, UW. Her talk focused on Ethnography’s unique role in the Social Sciences and its use of quantitative and qualitative data collection techniques based on participant observation and ethnographic interviews conducted from her research in the Palestinian West Bank.

Emily Kalah Gade is a research scientist in the Department of Political Science and a postdoctoral fellow at the eScience Institute, UW. In 2015, Gade conducted 58 life-story-style interviews with Palestinian olive farmers and 12 semi-structured interviews with municipal workers and defense soldiers in the West Bank and Israel and presented her research on “Connection and Resistance, Examining the Impact of Checkpoints on Civilian Support for Militancy”.

Paula Holmes-Eber is a professor of anthropology and an affiliate in the Department of Middle East Studies and the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, UW. Holmes-Eber presented her research and fieldwork experience conducted in the Middle East and how using the mixed-method approach – a combination of interviews, participant observation, and surveys create large N data corroborates a researcher’s findings and arguments.

Berkay Gulen is a Ph.D. candidate in International Studies at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, UW. Gulen is currently researching decision-making mechanisms in Turkey’s foreign policy change between 1991 and 2014 and discussed sampling and interview techniques in preparation for conducting field research.

Anissa Tanweer is a research scientist at the eScience Institute, UW focused on human-centered data science. Her work incorporates a range of qualitative methods for studying the practice and culture of data-intensive computational work, including interviews, surveys, and participant observation. At her QUAL Speaker Series talk, Tanweer highlighted some challenges common for ethnographers but also presented some unique ethical tensions and recalled her own research issues and offered approaches to addressing them.

Andre Stephens is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of Washington. He presented on his discovery after completing interviews for his fieldwork that the number of interviews completed was not as important as what one learned from them.

Ande Reisman, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and QUAL Concentration student, collected data during five home stays while on a Fulbright-funded research trip to Nepal in 2016. She experienced a child’s

Emily Willard, Ph.D. candidate in the Jackson School and research fellow at the UW Center for Human Rights, conducted dissertation research fieldwork on the women’s experience of conflict in Guatemala.