‘Social force’ Paul Mihas recalls 33 years at Odum
UNC Research’s Rooted series features the institute researcher and former managing editor of its journal.
Paul Mihas has worked for UNC-Chapel Hill in a variety of roles, most recently as the assistant director of qualitative and mixed methods research at the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science. He has also served as the assistant director of education at Odum and as the managing editor of the peer-reviewed academic journal Social Forces.
What brought you to Carolina?
I first came as a graduate student in the humanities and returned a few years later with an interest in academic publishing. I served as the managing editor of Social Forces, a sociology journal published, at the time, at UNC Press. Returning to Chapel Hill was partly motivated by my appreciation for Carolina’s intellectual history but also because it was a place that fostered lifelong learning and connections across disciplines and professions.
How has your role here changed over the years?
As the assistant director for education, I helped develop Odum’s educational mission and instructional content areas, inviting numerous scholars to share their expertise with cross-disciplinary audiences on campus. In 2012, I helped start a collaboration between the institute and ResearchTalk Inc. to hold the annual Qualitative Research Summer Intensive in Chapel Hill. In 2014, Odum administrative leadership and I partnered with UNC’s RENCI to create a one-week educational short course series called Data Matters. Both partnerships continue to this day.
My teaching responsibilities also expanded at Odum as I developed and taught methods short courses for academic audiences at Carolina and beyond. The latter includes QRSI, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, the University of Balamand in Lebanon, and the Global School of Empirical Research in Switzerland, Norway, and Slovenia.
Now, I am the lead qualitative researcher on grants through the School of Medicine, enabling me to become deeply involved in multiyear studies focused on topics of increasing relevance, such as the peer mentoring of underrepresented scientists in biomedicine.
What contribution are you most proud of?
Being a resource for qualitative researchers across campus and witnessing qualitative methods taking shape across Carolina over several decades. More specifically, I am proud of publishing methods chapters for several widely used encyclopedias in education and co-editing a volume for SAGE Publishing on analyzing interview data. Sharing my perspectives in writing for a large audience and shaping an edited volume of scholars’ works has been validating and an opportunity to connect with an international community of qualitative researchers.
Because I have a difficult time choosing just one thing, I would also point to the research methods courses I have taught in international settings such as the University of Balamand in Lebanon and the BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo.
What is a uniquely Carolina experience you’ve had?
Partnering with ResearchTalk Inc. to bring the Qualitative Research Summer Intensive to Chapel Hill attracted hundreds of researchers of all levels to The Carolina Inn. Though the event is now virtual (and international) with as many as 700 participants annually, it has always been as much about building community as it has been about advancing qualitative research methods.
As a co-organizer and instructor at the event, I watched participants forge partnerships over sweet tea and shrimp and grits and elevate their research using strategic approaches they learned at the intensive. That we could hold this event in our backyard — and raise the visibility of the Odum Institute and the University in the process — has been a distinctively Carolina experience.
