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.
“The discursive space we create during interviews is not static. It is a unique product of a unique set of conditions that are constantly being negotiated even as we exist within them.” (McMillan Cottom, Paragraph 14, line 7)
ReplyDeleteThe Tressie McMillan Cottom's quote called my attention in relation to the Dodson and Schmalzbauer’s reading. The McMillan Cotton’s story is a good example of the assumptions that we hold as researchers and the dialogical construction of meaning that happen during the interview process. As researchers, we all start an interview assuming something about our interviewees based on our previous knowledge about their status, gender, race, class or other identity label that we consider relevant. However, McMillan Cotton reminds us how dangerous is not being reflective during interviews, and not being able to response to the relationship and meaning that we are constructing with the research participants. Therefore, it is important to have a flexible approach during the interview process and to be aware about how our identity and intersectionality play out during the process.
After reading McMillan Cottom’s ideas, it was difficult for me reading Dodson and Schmalzbauer’s reading without being critical about it. The authors assume that low-income woman, as result of a common group experience, react in a similar way to research. They assume that low-income women omit information to protect their families or avoid to be critical about the system. I am not saying that this could not be a trend in low-income women, as result of the years of being under criticisms and surveillance. However, it seems strange to assume that this will be a common aspect in research with low-income women. Instead of assuming that this will happen, I think it is useful to keep this possible reaction in mind and be reflective during the interview process registering when we perceive tension or fear. We can also be aware of the silences or the use of catch phrases in our interviewees (ex. this is the land of the opportunities), so we can delve in these aspects during the interview or ask for other interview to do it. The idea of the authors of using people from the community to help to interpret omissions in low-income women discourse can shed light in the analysis. For example, it seems useful to use guidelines questions such as: “Are we hearing what is really going on in these people’s lives? Does this sound like what is going on in the lives of people you know?” (Dodson & Schmalzbauer, p.955). However, this kind of analysis has the risk of assuming that the experiences of low-income women is monolithic, and they can be explain for other people which own similar identity labels (for example other low-income people from the community). This could be a dangerous assumption in research, which can obscure the particular experience of our research participants and reinforce stereotypes.
I also appreciated Tressie McMillan Cottom's words and her emphasis on reflection, on considering the entire equation, rather than just one side or the other of it. Her colleague's response when McMillan Cottom spoke about her experience interviewing her first respondent gave me pause: "....'of course she’s angry, Tressie. She should be angry with life, with reflecting on shit she’d rather not reflect on. That she can be appropriately angry with you is a gift. The anger is the finding.'” And then McMillan Cottom's acknowledgement of how the gift to the researcher can simultaneously be a burden (and beyond) for the interviewee. Coming from the perspective of a clinician and as someone who is on the "interviewer" end of a study that can be emotionally jarring and triggering, I've experienced and appreciate the need to stop, to reach the point where the collection of data is no longer worth it. So this reflective awareness that she's writing about, beyond the awareness of identity and intersectionality but very much intertwined with it, is an awareness of impact. This discursive space, she writes, is not static. It isn't a neat, clean space. It's messy and uncomfortable and requires reflection not just after the fact, but in the moment.
ReplyDeleteIt's important, then, to consider ethics in the moment, rather than just broadly. The anger (sadness, frustration, pain, etc) is often the finding, as McMillan Cottom's colleague suggested, but is that ethical? What do we, as researchers, make available to participants to hold and support the emotions that arise? There is an assumption, I think, that we're "covered" in the informed consent by ackowledging that some questions might spark discomfort, or whatever language we choose to use. Do we/should we have a responsibility beyond that?
What I liked about the Dodson and Schmalzbauer article, broadly speaking, was the presentation of the ways in which participatory research can serve as part of the reflection in which McMillan Cottom calls us to engage. This process of consideration of the "...unique combination of those identities relative to the perceptions of the research respondents" (McMillan Cottom) requires us to slow down and it seems that participatory research involves the same. While it might not be the most efficient, there is a lot to be gained when we diverge from the "consent-interview-payment" process and make it more multi-facted as these approaches suggest. I wonder how the experience of McMillan Cottom's first respondent and McMillan Cottom's own experience might have been different had the process itself been different.
The following quote from Dodson & Schmalzbauer resonated with me as I think about my current role in a social science research program and my identity as a social worker:
ReplyDelete"As these rich texts reflect, many people facing poverty and stigma will share revelations and reflections provided they believe they are safe and their words are recognized as informed representations of their world. Despite these works, social research into the lives of marginalized people seldom explicates the context of risk or the likelihood that people will withhold data. This conventional omission allows researchers to interview, observe, and survey people ignoring the powerful context of marginalization; they may treat all 'fields' as neutral territory and all methods as universal" (p. 957).
This quote made me think about my impression and position in a psychiatric hospital setting and in a research setting. I feel almost as though I could gain the trust of patients easier than I could gain the trust of research participants because of what is at stake for the people I am "helping." Maybe it wasn't gaining their trust so much as it was in their best interest (as inpatients in a psychiatric hospital) to disclose very personal and potentially stigmatizing information about themselves in order to be discharged from the hospital as soon as possible-it could be considered coercive, but it feels more transparent to me than doing research sometimes. The power differential was very clear and talked about often. In a research setting, I don't necessarily have any authority or power, if you will, over people to tell me this kind of information about themselves, so their incentive for sharing seems less urgent-or since there won't be a direct reaction (such being discharged from the hospital) their reason for sharing is less important.
The quote from McMillan Cottom that stuck with me was:
ReplyDelete"I was not the student enrolling in our nine month beauty college but I was not my colleagues for whom the taken-for-granted assumptions of the college experience were designed."
I think the reason this resonated for me was the way in which dominant narratives of how college should be are grossly out of line with the actual reality of how most students in this country experience college. In particular, I believe that students like McMillan Cottom, who exist in a liminal space, are perhaps the most invisible than students who might be at either extreme (in terms of social capital and access).
This also highlighted a difference between research and practice for me. In particular, McMillan Cottom was the "go to" person in the office, presumably because of the way she could relate to and connect with her students. This relational aspect, however, did not carry over into the research environment. While it certainly highlights where misplaced assumptions may lie in the research process, it also illuminated for me the different roles assumed in these contexts. In the practice environment, the student is often the one seeking help. They are wanting to relate because they are actively seeking a connection. In the research environment, almost the reverse is true. The researcher needs the participant. This drastically changes the power relationship and thus also changes the landscape in which some of these assumptions play out. It fits well with the themes we've discussed of the "researcher's gaze."
The quote from McMillan Cottom that stuck with me was:
ReplyDelete"I was not the student enrolling in our nine month beauty college but I was not my colleagues for whom the taken-for-granted assumptions of the college experience were designed."
I think the reason this resonated for me was the way in which dominant narratives of how college should be are grossly out of line with the actual reality of how most students in this country experience college. In particular, I believe that students like McMillan Cottom, who exist in a liminal space, are perhaps the most invisible than students who might be at either extreme (in terms of social capital and access).
This also highlighted a difference between research and practice for me. In particular, McMillan Cottom was the "go to" person in the office, presumably because of the way she could relate to and connect with her students. This relational aspect, however, did not carry over into the research environment. While it certainly highlights where misplaced assumptions may lie in the research process, it also illuminated for me the different roles assumed in these contexts. In the practice environment, the student is often the one seeking help. They are wanting to relate because they are actively seeking a connection. In the research environment, almost the reverse is true. The researcher needs the participant. This drastically changes the power relationship and thus also changes the landscape in which some of these assumptions play out. It fits well with the themes we've discussed of the "researcher's gaze."
I'm struck here and elsewhere by how much there is to take in, process, and try to account for in some way. As McMillan Cottom says:
ReplyDelete"We talk often in ethnographic work about the importance of interrogating the researcher and contextualizing the fullness of complex subjects. We usually do this by working one side of the equation at a time: we interrogate the researcher or the subject; race or class; analytical categories or intersectionality."
Here even intersectionality is just one half of a duality; there is always a larger context that holds ones view, even if that view is holding myriad contexts. I struggle with how broad to get in my writing, and where to arbitrarily cut off the relevant context, as my explanations of self and situation spiral endlessly outward into ever-larger circles of meaning...