News

Ezequiel González Ocantos, Nuffield Professorial Fellow, has been awarded the 2025 Alexander George Best Article Award from the American Political Science Association’s Qualitative and Multi-Methods Research section.

He was awarded the prize for his article ‘Aligning Interviewing with Process Tracing’ co-authored with Juan Masullo (University of Milan), which appeared in Sociological Methods and Research (SMR) in 2024.

It is not the first time Ezequiel González Ocantos has won the prize, with him also being awarded the accolade in 2020 for his article ‘Process Tracing and the Problem of Missing Data’, written with Dr Jody LaPorte.

Commenting on his latest winning paper, the award committee wrote: 

‘The committee was unanimous in its decision. We found the article systematic in considering the various strategies for designing, sampling, and sequencing interviews to yield insights for process tracing. 

‘The resulting analysis provides a treasure trove of methodological insights and practical guidance for researchers using these tools and seeking to combine them.  

‘As such, the article adds to the important work in the field that seeks to go beyond a general defense of qualitative methods to the rigorous application and systematic improvement of these methods.’

Ezequiel González Ocantos said: "This is a methodology article that develops a series of tools for scholars who rely on interviews to study contemporary and historical political processes. The paper offers guidelines to decide who to talk to and how to design questionnaires with the goal of strengthening causal inference."

To learn more, read the article on the Department of Politics and International Relations' website.