Cornell University, March 2001
The first Q2 conference, organised by Ravi Kanbur, took place in March 2001 at Cornell University. It brought together leaders from “Qual” and “Quant” traditions of poverty analysis and focused on conceptual issues concerning definitions, ways of combining and strengths/limitation of approaches. The discussion was fruitful and the proceedings were published in the Kanbur-edited volume Q-Squared: Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Poverty Appraisal, Permanent Black, 2003. Conference papers appear in the Q2 Working Paper Series.

University of Toronto, May, 2004
The second conference, jointly organised by Ravi Kanbur and Paul Shaffer, was held at the University of Toronto in May 2004. It aimed to move beyond conceptual issues to a detailed assessment of cases in which qualitative and quantitative methods had been applied to address specific questions. Around a dozen papers were selected spanning South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Malawi, Ethiopia, India and the United States. The disciplinary coverage included anthropology, sociology, economics, epidemiology and development studies. The conference program and papers can be found at www.utoronto.ca/mcis/q2 and were published in a special edition of World Development (Vol. 35, No. 2, 2007).

Centre for Analysis and Forecasting, Vietnamese Academy of Social Sciences, Hanoi, 2007
This third conference, “Q-Squared in Policy”, which will focued on policy implications of mixed method approaches to poverty analysis, was the logical culmination of the first two. Its objective was to bring together recent examples of the use of “Q-Squared-type” work to inform decision-making processes. By ‘decision-making’, we mean policy-level or programmatic decisions at national or sub-national levels by governments, NGOs, development organizations, etc. The conference organizers were Ravi Kanbur (Cornell University), Nguyen Thang (CAF/VASS), Ellen Bortei-Doku Aryeetey (Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER), University of Ghana) and Paul Shaffer (University of Toronto and Trent University). Select conference papers will appear in a Special Issue of the International Journal of Mixed Research Approaches (Vol 2. No. 2,, 2008) (Conference Program).