ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the state of quantitative non-governmental organizations (NGOs) research, based on the existing data environment, as well as consider some of the challenges for quantitative NGO research moving forward. Many NGO scholars have created excellent primary data sources for their particular research questions. The nature of NGOs as organizations has made scholars’ efforts to obtain systematic, large-scale data very difficult. Political and technological developments in the last few years make a global NGO dataset, which stretches across time and countries, achievable now in ways that were not previously possible. Each organization will be given a unique identifying number to avoid confusion among similarly named organizations, confederations of organizations, or international NGOs with national branches in different countries. Mobilizing new data, and applying diverse methods of analysis to these new data once they are available, will allow scholars to address current weaknesses in the largely descriptive and highly selective NGO literature.
