Conference: Support for Conferences and Mentoring of Women and Underrepresented Groups in Political Methodology

Diverse voices and diverse methodological approaches are essential for solving the challenges facing society today. This project supports educational, training, and networking opportunities for members of under-represented groups to engage and give voice to these future and young scholars. First, we build a support-network and provide methodological education for a cohort of undergraduates, creating a potential pipeline of diversity into the field by recruiting women and students of color. Second, we provide explicit support for a women's conference in methodology, building a supportive community for women methodologists. Third, we provide explicit support for the field's annual national meeting to support the participation of women and students of color. In this way, we are able to address the most critical weaknesses in the field of political methodology and provide meaningful growth and attention to each, in particular allowing relationships to build in ways that both diversify the field and allow for expansion into new communities of scholars. With rising interest worldwide in data science and measurement, the field of political methodology is increasingly central to the study of political science. This proposal supports multiple efforts by the Society for Political Methodology to engage and give voice to a diverse array of scholars. These efforts include (a) providing undergraduate students in underrepresented groups educational training in partnership with the ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research, (b) supporting the Visions in Methodology Conference for women in political methodology, (c) supporting the attendance of women and students of color at the Society for Political Methodology Annual Meeting, and (d) fostering greater dialogue and data-sharing across constituent groups. By attending to each step in the pipeline, we maximize the chances that our efforts to meaningfully diversity the field will be successful. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.