Nothing will get a labor economist’s mental gears turning like the word “shortage.” At the very utterance of this term, Michael Podgursky’s ears perk up, his eyebrow rises, and he leans over his desk: “What do you mean by shortages?” It’s not that Podgursky isn’t accustomed to hearing the word—quite the contrary, actually. As a professor of Economics at MU, his query results from extensive research on education, a field that has fallen victim on numerous occasions to accusations of “shortages.”

Larsen gathers his data through a variety of different methods ranging from ethnographic field research to content analysis and GIS. But the method he prefers is called “participant observation,” an approach in which “you go and live with the people for an extended period of time, so you can start to learn how they think and feel and act.” In fact, Larsen considers participant observation to be a base line for all the research he does because “you gain an insight by participating in the culture.”

From reading court cases to scouring such legal databases as Lexis-Nexis and WestLaw, Mitchell explains how a legal scholar goes about gathering research data. He also describes a teaching strategy employed in his classes to handle conflict-ridden legal subjects that require one to “take sides.”

Selecting history research projects, according to Watts, is a combination of careful assessment and serendipity. For this historian, gathering data is sometimes like hunting for treasure. Watts has had a string of good luck, as it turns out, since Henry Ford, Walt Disney, and Hugh Hefner all compiled archives through which Watts was allowed to dig.

Recently, school districts and states have started collecting large data sets about students and teachers. Podgursky compares this tremendous treasure-trove of data to a candy shop for economists. These longitudinal data systems are important, because by analyzing student growth and achievement he can also determine the productivity rates of individual teachers.