All linguistic research has the potential to reproduce or challenge racial notions.

—Linguistic Society of America Statement on Race (2019)

The LSA Statement on Race stems from a larger conversation around undertheorized treatment of race and ethnicity in linguistics research and practice. In this commentary, we define racial identity and ethnicity and explain their relevance for linguistic research. We discuss considerations that linguistic researchers should take prior to research, during study design, and following research, and we offer specific recommendations when soliciting or using race and ethnicity data. These recommendations aim to help researchers avoid social harm, ensure ethical compliance and research integrity, and improve descriptive accuracy, especially for undersampled groups, by balancing research transparency with generalizability. We consider issues germane to collecting self-disclosures of ethnicity and racial identity in a range of study types spanning several subfields of linguistics. We give concrete examples of questions that may arise in planning studies in computational and corpus-based linguistics, formal linguistics, experimental linguistics, and qualitative linguistics. We speak to ethical considerations, including the importance of using locally constructed labels, analyst positionality, and respect for communities. Our goals are to provide linguistic researchers with a firmer basis for conceptualizing racial identity and ethnicity particularly as pertains to linguistics, and to supply a guide that aids linguists in reflecting on their own study design, positionality, and responsibility to participants and communities.

Research syntheses have demonstrated that pronunciation instruction works, which means that whether instruction is effective is no longer an open question. Instead, contemporary intervention research has shifted to investigating how instruction can be further optimized, asking targeted questions about the instructional features that catalyze learning. In this paper, I examine the concept of instructional optimization, focusing on anticipated effect sizes (gains). I outline a four-pronged empirical approach to provide robust data for designing optimal pronunciation interventions. First, I describe the need for replication studies, which provide insight into the precision and stability of effects across distinct research samples and contexts. Second, I advocate for a systematic approach to study design. In such an approach, which is closely tied to the principles of replication, one or two variables are manipulated at a time, leading to a set of maximally comparable studies that lend insight into the impact of specific variables. Third, I explain the need to situate instruction within a longitudinal perspective to examine how robust and durable instructional gains are. Finally, I turn to adaptive approaches, where the surface format that instruction takes is highly variable and responsive to learner needs while the adaptive decision tree that generates the form is fixed and replicable.

Elite donors are a crucial and sought-after source of funding for many nonprofit organisations, but there is a dearth of substantive empirical studies presenting primary data on such donors’ motivations, experiences and perspectives. There are challenges for social scientists in conducting interviews with elites, notably: gaining access to elite donors; developing sufficient rapport to discuss a topic that involves money and morals; and making sense of data without being dazzled by striking surface differences between elites and non-elites. These barriers have resulted in a long-standing over-reliance on secondary sources and on interviews with proxies such as foundation staff and wealth advisers. This paper reviews the small body of work that presents findings from interviews with elite donors and draws on my experience of conducting interviews with 46 wealthy UK donors, in order to critically analyse the implementation of this research design. This paper adds to the literature by extending understanding of elite donors’ reasons for agreeing to be interviewed and contributes to advancing third sector research by highlighting strategies to overcome challenges in conducting elite interviews in order to gain a less mediated understanding of the contexts, cultures and subjectivities of their focus of study.

This article provides a reassessment of the literature on the transformative impact of the EU on Turkey through the lens of the ‘Europeanisation research programme’. It relies on systematic examination of a sample of the literature based on substantive findings, research design and methods. It suggests that this sample displays limitations characteristic of the Europeanisation research programme and proposes to remedy these limitations by applying the research design and methods used therein for generating empirically based comparative research on Turkey.

One of the key challenges graduate students face is how to come up with a good rationale for their theses. Unfortunately, the methods literature in and beyond political science does not provide much advice on this important issue. While focusing on how to conduct research, this literature has largely neglected the question of why a study should be undertaken. The limited discussions that can be found suggest that new research is justified if it (1) fills a ‘gap’; (2) addresses an important real-world problem; and/or (3) is methodologically rigorous. This article discusses the limitations of these rationales. Then, it proposes that research puzzles are more useful for clarifying the nature and importance of a contribution to existing research, and hence a better way of justifying new research. The article also explores and clarifies what research puzzles are, and begins to devise a method for constructing them out of the vague ideas and questions that often trigger a research process.

This contribution to the debate on the challenges to comparative politics largely focuses on the issue of differences versus similarities, the issue that has been raised by both authors: Caramani and Van Kersbergen. I share their concern that too much research focuses on differences between countries and I also join them in locating the sources of this bias in methodological considerations. I do not agree however with some of Caramani's points, in particular his fundamental claim that explanation necessarily demands variations across cases; a claim that seems also to be made at least implicitly by Van Kersbergen. I argue that the validity of an explanation rather depends on the degree to which empirical evidence is congruent with observable implications of this explanation and is not congruent with implications of rival explanations. It is irrelevant whether these theoretical expectations concern differences or similarities between countries. I therefore advocate a theory-driven rather than a case-driven analysis of national political systems in order to meet the challenge to explain similarities between them.

Social scientists often face a fundamental problem: Did I leave something causally important out of my explanation? How do I diagnose this? Where do I look for solutions to this problem? We build bridges between regression models and qualitative comparative analysis by comparing diagnostics and solutions to the problem of omitted variables and conditions. We then discuss various approaches and tackle the theoretical issues around causality which must be addressed before attending to technical fixes. In the conclusions, we reflect on the bridges built between the two traditions and draw more general lessons about the logic of social science research.

This editorial examines the empirical foundations of Chinese management research through an analysis of data sources and research designs in all empirical papers published in Management and Organization Review (MOR) over the past five years. Our review shows that 53.2% of studies rely on archival or secondary data, with 37% of quantitative studies focusing on publicly listed firms. While established datasets provide consistency and comparability, their prevalence may limit opportunities to explore China’s diverse organizational ecosystem. We identify three promising avenues for advancing the field: (1) expanding empirical attention to include a wider variety of organizational forms, (2) leveraging emerging computational methods, digital trace data, and AI-enabled technologies, and (3) recognizing the development of novel datasets as valuable scholarly contributions in their own right. We also examine how recent regulatory developments are creating new considerations for research design while reinforcing the value of collaborative approaches between international and Chinese scholars. We contend that by embracing methodological pluralism and adapting to evolving data landscapes, management scholars can generate additional novel insights that illuminate the complexity and distinctiveness of Chinese organizational life.

Both sex (biological) and gender (socio-cultural) are increasingly recognized as important factors in disease risks and outcomes, including parasitic infections and especially those of the genital tract. Many funding agencies now require these dimensions be incorporated into research proposals, though little guidance is given regarding how, leading to confusion among those who do not specialize in this area. In this commentary, I review instances of the use of the word ‘gender’ in the archives of Parasitology (174 articles) to assess how parasitologists are progressing in the incorporation of this dimension and identify what can be done to improve efforts. Use of the term has increased since 1990, reflecting an enthusiasm among parasitologists for including this dimension to their work. Examination of articles which use this term reveals that correct and thorough incorporation of the gender dimension has also increased, but that these articles only account for 8.0% of all articles using the term, demonstrating widespread persistent confusion around terminology regarding sex and gender and how to best account for gender in parasitological research. Parasitologists studying animals should only refer to sex and should incorporate sex into their research design and report whether there are differences in baseline or response between sexes. Parasitologists studying humans should incorporate sex, but then also consider whether any observed differences are due to biological factors like sex hormones and immunity or gendered social variables like behavioural norms and healthcare access. These considerations will further our understanding of host–parasite interactions and improve health outcomes.