In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked serious concern within qualitative research communities and raised fundamental questions about the meaning, value, costs, and intellectual relevance of transparency for qualitative inquiry. In this Perspectives Reflection, we crystallize the central findings of a three-year deliberative process—the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD)—involving hundreds of political scientists in a broad discussion of these issues. Following an overview of the process and the key insights that emerged, we present summaries of the QTD Working Groups’ final reports. Drawing on a series of public, online conversations that unfolded at www.qualtd.net, the reports unpack transparency’s promise, practicalities, risks, and limitations in relation to different qualitative methodologies, forms of evidence, and research contexts. Taken as a whole, these reports—the full versions of which can be found in the Supplementary Materials—offer practical guidance to scholars designing and implementing qualitative research, and to editors, reviewers, and funders seeking to develop criteria of evaluation that are appropriate—as understood by relevant research communities—to the forms of inquiry being assessed. We dedicate this Reflection to the memory of our coauthor and QTD working group leader Kendra Koivu.1

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a white matter disease associated with neurocognitive difficulties. More recently the potential for white matter pathology to also disrupt important aspects of emotion understanding has been recognized. However, no study to date has assessed whether capacity for facial affect recognition and theory of mind (ToM) is disrupted in MS, or whether any observed deficits are related to more general cognitive impairment. In the present study MS participants (n = 27) and nonclinical controls (n = 30) were administered measures of facial affect recognition, ToM, and cognitive functioning. MS participants were significantly impaired on the ToM task, and also presented with specific deficits decoding facial emotions of anger and fear. Performance on the measures of facial affect recognition and ToM were related to general cognitive functioning, and in particular, measures sensitive to executive dysfunction and information processing speed. These data highlight the need for future research to more fully delineate the extent and implications of emotion understanding difficulties in this population. (JINS, 2009, 15, 277–285.)

Problem solving by patients with clinically definite multiple sclerosis (MS) was examined using the Wisconsin and California Card Sorting Tests (WCST and CCST). On the WCST, the MS patients achieved fewer categories and made more perseverative responses and errors than controls, confirming results of several previous studies. On the CCST, the MS patients generated and identified fewer concepts, but they performed normally when sorting was cued by the experimenter and they made no more persevcrations than controls. Although findings from the WCST indicate that the problem solving deficits by MS patients closely resemble those exhibited by patients with various conditions that produce frontal lobe dysfunction, results from the CCST indicate that the problem solving difficulties exhibited by patients with MS arc distinct and probably represent a primary deficit in concept formation. (JINS, 1996, 2, 134–140.)

When required to locate places on outline maps, males consistently perform more accurately than females. This sex difference in geographical knowledge has been observed in samples throughout the United States, in all age ranges examined from the second to the 9th decade of life and in samples differing in average education level from high school to postgraduate degrees. Both males and females appear to acquire geographical knowledge during surface travel through the environment. The information acquired during everyday travel is apparently integrated into topographic representations that comprise a cognitive map. This process is less efficient in females probably because they attend to and remember more about landmarks and less about distance and directional cues than do males. To examine the importance of driving experience on the ability to locate places on an outline map of the Oklahoma City metropolitan area, adolescents who were too young to drive and older persons with varying amounts of experience traveling in the metropolitan area were studied. In the present study the magnitude of the sex difference in accuracy, though not the absolute level of performance, was similar in groups of people too young to drive and in younger and older drivers. Hence, the sex difference in geographical knowledge cannot be the product of differences in driving that may exist between males and females. (JINS, 2002, 8, 804–810.)

Findings from a recent population-based survey indicate that about 33% of patients with dementia reside alone. Because many of these patients may not have a caregiver who visits them regularly, the need for a neuropsychological (NP) test to predict patients' functional competence to live alone safely is evident. In this study, we compared the accuracy of predicting Instrumental and Basic Activities (IADLs and ADLs) of 22 patients with Alzheimer's disease using several standard NP tests and the newly developed Problems in Everyday Living (PEDL) test. Performance of IADLs and ADLs as rated by caregivers was significantly correlated with performance on the PEDL, the Mini-Mental State Exam (MMSE), and with the Shipley Institute of Living Test of Verbal Abstraction (SILS-A), but not with vocabulary or naming. The PEDL was the best predictor of IADL scores (r = 0.71), compared to the MMSE (r = 0.52) and the SILS-A (r = 0.57), while the MMSE was the best predictor of ADL performance (r = 0.69), compared to the PEDL (r = 0.58) and the SILS-A (r = 0.50). (JINS, 2002, 8, 48–57.)

Normal elderly control participants showed short-term (10-min delay) and long-term (12 months delay) priming on the Gollin Figures Test. Nearly all patients with Alzheimer's disease or vascular dementia showed short-term priming, but the magnitude of their priming was less than that of controls. Significant long-term priming was not observed for the dementia groups. Differences between controls and dementia patients on the short-term priming test may depend upon structural–perceptual processes that are intact in dementia patients and controls and explicit memory functions available only to controls. The same model could account for differences between normal elderly and dementia patients on the long-term priming test, but several other explanations are also plausible. (JINS, 1998, 4, 336–341.)

Studies have consistently found that patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) are impaired on tests of anterograde memory, but the status of remote memory in MS remains unclear. To better understand remote memory in MS we administered the Autobiographical Memory Interview (AMI) to 44 MS patients and 19 normal controls matched for age, education, and gender. Additionally, a shortened version of the Famous Faces Test, a test of recall of past U.S. presidents, and a 14-word learning list were administered. Patients performed significantly lower than controls on the learning list and Famous Faces Test, but not on recall of past presidents. On the AMI, patients were significantly impaired on recall of semantic but not of episodic memories. These results indicate that MS patients exhibit retrograde amnesia that cannot be attributed to anterograde memory deficits or lack of exposure to task-relevant information. (JINS, 1997, 3, 246–251.)

It has been suggested that amnesic patients suffer a selective loss of episodic memory while semantic memory remains well preserved. To assess the validity of this idea we studied remote memory in an amnesic patient, (M.R.L.), using several different measures that differ in the extent which they engage episodic or semantic memory. On two different versions of the Albert et al. (1979) remote memory battery M.R.L. displayed severe retrograde amnesia (RA) extending backwards in time for about 15 years with excellent preservation of older memories. With standard recall instructions his overall performance on the Crovitz test of autobiographical memory was impaired and all of M.R.L.'s specific, temporally dated memories were given from the first half of life. When asked to reconstruct his past residential history in detail, M.R.L. provided specific and generally accurate information for residences occupied from his boyhood until 1970, but thereafter his memory became quite unreliable. On a test of knowledge of terms commonly employed the surveying profession, in which he worked for the past 20 years, M.R.L.'s performance was also impaired. The consistent pattern of RA displayed by this patient on all of the tests of remote memory indicates that both episodic and semantic memory are impaired in amnesia.