Field experiments with police agencies represent a new frontier in collaboration between researchers and the public sector. This chapter explores the practical and ethical challenges inherent in partnerships with the police, sharing reflections and lessons from our experiences in the six countries included in the study. We describe what we have learned from both scholarship and experience about how to build effective partnerships and to design ethical interventions with the goal of informing the next generation of research–practice partnerships on issues of public order, security, and policing.

What is the effect of community policing in settings where trust in the police is low and local legal institutions make witness cooperation unusually critical for certain kinds of offenses? We study the effect of a citizen-centric problem-oriented policing (CPOP) intervention introduced in March 2019 in Punjab’s Sheikhupura Region, a mixed urban-rural region of 4.9M people. Treatment roll-out in Pakistan was significantly hampered by frequent transfers of the regional and district police officers, reflecting the challenges of implementing institutional reforms in settings where the police face frequent personnel changes. Despite these challenges, the intervention, which included regular town hall meetings at which citizens could share their concerns, led to significant increases in overall perceptions about the police and in citizen beliefs that police have good intentions with respect to addressing crime. Despite the favorable institutional environment for increased trust to lead to crime reduction, we find no evidence of downstream impacts of the program on self-reported crime victimization or crime reported to the police. Observational evidence from follow-up visits suggests that this was because of resource and institutional challenges that limited community police officers’ agency and prevented them from responding to community concerns.

This chapter introduces the concept of community policing and provides a brief history of the practice and its spread. The chapter then identifies a significant gap in rigorous evidence of its efficacy, especially as the practice has been adopted by police agencies in the Global South and describes the core enterprise of the research agenda: a set of coordinated, randomized-control trials evaluating the impact of community policing in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The chapter concludes with a summary of the findings and a discussion of broader implications for the study of policing.

After mastering the fundamentals of theory-driven empirical networks research, there are many options for what to do next. If you do not yet have a particular project in mind, reading widely can be a valuable source of inspiration – hopefully this book has conveyed that the range of possible applications is broad. If you do have one in mind, reading about methods of analysis can help choose a plan appropriate to the project. This chapter is designed to help select a way forward.

Once the data are collected and cleaned, we can start to explore features of the network. Taking an initial look at descriptive network statistics is a good way to take an overview of the data and to spot red flags that signal a problem with the data entry or cleaning. The earlier these can be identified, the better. This chapter serves as a tutorial for using R to do so using the igraph package. It introduces the process of importing a data file into R and walks through the first things you might do with the data, including computing descriptive statistics of the structural features, integrating substantive features of nodes and links, and visualizing the network.

The move from theory to empirics requires figuring out how to collect evidence that could support or disconfirm hypotheses derived from your theory. Empirically studying the network in your theory requires two steps: determining which nodes to include in your data and operationalizing the link type. This chapter helps a reader select the boundary that contains the nodes of interest, pointing out some subtle downsides to random sampling in network studies. It also helps readers determine whether they want to measure full networks or ego ones and offers pointers on operationalizing link types.

In this chapter we focus on ethical challenges for researchers who are engaged in qualitative digital research. We argue that the digital world has opened up huge opportunities for qualitative researchers, but it has also brought complex and multi-layered ethical challenges for qualitative researchers to navigate. Although we consider that there can no longer be a clear-cut rule book of “If–Then” ethical actions, we do offer examples drawn from researchers working in a range of disciplines and share how they have identified, navigated, and addressed the ethical issues raised when working digitally.

This chapter introduces some technical details about networks. Although they may seem like a complication that could be saved for later, the details presented here are actually a useful starting point. They will provide a sense of the many options for ways that a network can matter, which is helpful to have in mind when constructing a theory that will guide data collection. A social network is a record of a set of relationships – links – among actors in a group of interest. Depending on which relationships are present, an individual may find herself in a very different network position than someone else. Different groups can have different patterns of relationships, which means there can also be variation across networks. This chapter will help us be precise in these comparisons across actors and across networks and will highlight why they can be relevant to empirical research.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, collecting data online was the only option for many researchers. This chapter describes the barriers to, advantages of, and key lessons learned in conducting online interviews during the pandemic. We draw on a qualitative study focusing on employment experiences during the pandemic among youth with and without disabilities. Thirty interviews were conducted synchronously via Zoom. Barriers to conducting online interviews included technical difficulties and some challenges with building rapport. Benefits of conducting online interviews included greater efficiency and flexibility, technical advantages, and perceived anonymity and privacy. Key lessons learned in conducting online interviews included testing equipment in advance and having a back-up recorder, giving participants questions in advance or having it on the shared screen, and providing technical information to participants in an easy-to-understand format.

An empirical social networks study is concerned with what a well-defined social network is like, and whether and how it matters in some context of interest. Designing a successful one requires serious thinking on the front end about what the network is and what it does in theory. This book aims to help researchers do just that. To begin, this chapter motivates this research area with examples from political science, explains why the topic is unique enough to warrant a whole book, and offers guidance on how to know if your research should incorporate networks.

The authors have used video diaries extensively in corporate ethnography and have found them to be an essential tool in the collection of observational data in health care and consumer research. Drawing on their experience, the chapter explores video diaries’ practical uses in ethnographic research, detailing their strengths and weaknesses in the types of research questions they can help answer and the kinds of data they produce. The chapter also serves as a guide to incorporating video diaries into ethnographic and qualitative research, offering practical advice on topics including video diary guides, communication strategies with participants, and the advantages and disadvantages of mobile phone diaries versus free-standing camcorder diaries.