Interviewing: Dynamic meetings of complex personhoods

One of the biggest weaknesses of the social science field, and how it is taught in higher ed, is that it cloaks itself in how-to manuals, steps, working the mythology that research is a straightforward enterprise that, if designed well, can be more valid and more reliable. As I've mentioned several times in class, our particular genealogical fascination has been with metrics rather than ethics and theory, in the pursuit of validity and knowability. If there is a central lesson to be had from the vast amounts of poststructural theories available, it is that there is no true center, no easy metric, no method that isn't animated by the people interacting through the method. We each are complex people, full of contradictions and ethical frontiers; why would we expect research to not reflect those same complexities?

Our two readings on interviewing for this week help us to think more precisely about how this method of just asking questions (aka, interviewing) is itself much more complex than simply deciding upon open or semi-structured approaches (qual research 101 here).

For me, this quote from Tressie McMillan Cottom stuck out as brilliance far exceeding its short length: "It is not which identities in what combination I bring to the research setting that inform the ethnographic dance but the unique combination of those identities relative to the perceptions of the research respondents." 

In fact, while we take it as a 'true-ism' that all researchers modify any space just by being there, these articles take us to a level of specifity that often doesn't follow from the precedign statement. 

What stood out to you from these readings? Consider using a quote from which to elaborate your thinking. 

On Written Language Bias

It's been a consistent theme in our course to understand research as socially, historically, and culturally specific. On that note, CDA must be contextualized as an examination of language that is buoyed through, largely, British and American English codes. As a reminder of the particularity of those codes, I encourage you to listen to this podcast that profiles the language reclamation project of the Ojibwe peoples. In particular, minutes 7:30-11:30 provide an excellent snapshot of how language and culture are inseparable, through the illustration of Ojibwe nouns and verbs operating drastically differently than in American English. There are, simply put, many more nouns in English, and Ojibwe is more mediated through verbs. This is not just about language and syntax but about relationships that are constructed through language.

Grounded theory and positivism

Hi Everyone,

I kept thinking about Kyeonghue's question Wednesday about the relationship between grounded theory and positivism. Here are some further thoughts about it.

In class, I said that I believed grounded theory to not be positivist in nature due to how much it privileges research participants' words, making a link between lived reality and multiple versions of that. However, going back to Glaser and Strauss' work, I think the relationship is more ambivalent. Grounded theory moves the pursuit of knowledge from deductive to inductive, but does not theorize clearly and explicitly whether multiple contradictory truths may exist. Instead, they posit that overarching metanarratives are insufficient for understanding all lived experiences. Contrast that, say, to Deleuze and Guattari's well known philosophies on the relationship between patterns and aberrations, and grounded theory starts feeling much more positivistic. Glaser and Strauss do not theorize as to the multiplicity of truths held in a particular moment, which is one of the features of postpositivism.

As always, I encourage you to do some of this kind of thinking for yourself, as part of doing advanced philosophical studies. Instead of trusting when any professor, book, or article categorizes any approach, read against it a bit and look for how the approach uses particular lines of logic.

be well,
Leigh.

FROM SELLING CRACK TO SOCIOLOGY...


An interesting and thought-provoking profile of a sociologist, his work, and his insider status in several cultural spaces.