All posts by Sandra Mathison

Metaphors: how they help us to understand social life (and maybe make positive change)

data analysis, metaphors, methods, politics, research examples

I’ve written a few posts about metaphors  including their centrality to how knowledge about and action in the social world is constructed [The Power of Metaphors] and how to use a metaphoric lens during data analysis [Making Sense of Metaphors].

People use metaphors often as a short-hand, a way to capture complex ideas and relationships; to direct attention in a particular way; and often to present a moral view. In British Columbia where I live the province is in the midst of a fairly pitched battle between the teachers union and the government (ok so I’ve already tipped my hand in terms of the metaphor I use in talking about these labor relations). A rising chorus of voices have begun to use the metaphor of labor relations as marriage, not surprisingly since both the teachers union and the government claim to have the best interests of children at heart.

The labor relations as marriage works on a number of levels and not on many others. But, it is dominant in the media, the rhetoric of the union and the government, school administrators, students, and analysts. So, it needs to be taken seriously to understand the impasse in negotiations (and indeed the now decade old acrimonious relationship between the two) and using this understanding to both think and then act differently.

arguing-parents610px

Here’s a link to the article:  Does It Help to Say the BC Teachers and the Government are in a Bad Marriage?

 

 

 

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confidentiality ~ the case of the Belfast Project

ethics, politics

For years, the researchers painstakingly recorded and transcribed oral histories from many of the leaders of the factions caught up in the Troubles in Northern Ireland. They pledged absolute secrecy to their subjects until after their deaths.

This is not your typical and straightforward case of researchers’ data becoming embroiled in a legal battle, and I’ve no sense that I understand all the details, players, and consequences. In Secrets from Belfast: How Boston College’s oral history of the Troubles fell victim to an international murder investigation, Chronicle of Higher Ed reporter Beth McMurtrie gives a pretty full account of the matter. And CNN had a 2012 story, Secrets of the Belfast Project, and the text of a conference paper, The Belfast Project and the Boston College Subpoena Case about the initial subpoena was written by Anthony McIntyre. And, a good overview of the issues around resisting subpoena’s for research data can be found on the Institutional Review Blog.

That this was not a research project is apparent ~ it was not conducted by BC researchers, it was described as not your typical oral history, and there was no participation by BC institutional research review board.  Belfast Project’s organizers were: Thomas Hachey, BC’s head of Irish programs; Ed Moloney, project director and journalist; Anthony McIntyre, project interviewer, historian, and former IRA member; and Robert O’Neill, head of the Burns Library at BC.

One imagines that BC’s motivations were complex:

An Irish-American success story, BC has risen from a modest 19th-century college, founded to educate the children of poor Irish immigrants, into a prestigious institution with an endowment of nearly $2-billion. It has proudly maintained its connections to Ireland through its Irish collection at the Burns Library, its Irish-studies program, and its Irish Institute, which attempts to promote reconciliation in Ireland and Northern Ireland through professional-development programs.

Some have suggested that had there been IRB review and approval for the project, none of this would have happened. This is unlikely, as IRBs are relatively feeble guardians of confidentiality. And, this is a serious problem for research (oral history is certainly a prime example) where narrators, participants, and sources are necessarily named. Others have noted the chilling effect the successful subpoena will have on research on criminal, political and violent social phenomena.

This case is a mess and there is little reason to believe we understand all that is going on. However, researchers continue to do research and the legal and criminal battle around the Belfast Project should provide fodder for continued debate about how research can be done ethically, especially when the focus is something illegal or criminal. Just a few take aways:

  1. researchers should be more cautious about the promises of confidentiality they make… simply saying it isn’t much of a guarantee, but explicitly considering how and if indeed confidentiality is necessary is essential
  2. new strategies for protecting confidentiality are needed, so leaks to the press and police are avoided
  3. universities need to step up to the legal plate and defend researchers and all of the IRB hoops they ask researchers to jump through… if researchers are required by the university to promise confidentiality then the university is obligated to defend that promise

See also, my previous posts on the Luka Magnotta case in Ottawa, where the courts upheld the confidentiality of research interviews.

UPDATE: Boston College has agreed to return interview tapes and transcripts to interviewees who request them. It’s the least they can do, but the Belfast Project debacle illustrates how politics and lack of consideration for ethical issues might make very interesting research nearly impossible.

UPDATE: NBC News requested the release of the Belfast Project transcripts, and a federal court judge has ruled against that request.

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people and stuff ~ a few more thoughts on material culture

image based research, material culture, narrative inquiry, representation

Consider this strategy suggested by Ali McCannell, a UBC graduate student ~ if you want to know what matters to people in a particular community, city, country visit a convenience or corner store and see what’s for sale. Her example was from her time spent teaching in Korea where she noted the following commonly available items in pretty much any small shop: “grooming items, booze, double eyelid tape, a huge selection of yogurt drinks, kimchi and worm larvae.” I won’t speculate on what that list might mean, but at first glance it speaks volumes. What’s in your corner store?

People’s stuff can be interesting and useful in a range of research methodologies. For example, in narrative research one might collect and analyze stories but look also to people embedded in their environment, including how they talk about it. Although not social science per se, a new book Artists, Writers, Thinkers, Dreamers: Portraits of Fifty Famous Folks & All Their Weird Stuff illustrates such connections. While this book is more a novelty, it does illustrate the interconnections between people and the things they use, surround themselves with and value. It gives us an idea of how to think about objects in relation to social meaning of lives and equally important it illustrates how those connections might be represented beyond text based descriptions.

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Photo essays

image based research, importance of place, publications, representation, research examples

Photo essays have been around for a long time ~ they are a series of photos, sometimes with captions, descriptive and/or explanatory text. Usually photo essays illustrate something that is more immediately knowable through an image, often by evoking an emotional response, but often also by showing. A photo essay structures a collection of images either in a specific order to illustrate the progression of events, emotions, and concepts OR thematically to illustrate concepts. Photojournalists and photographers create photo essays and intuitively portray lived experiences; social scientists create photo essays and explicitly explore and represent lived experiences. One isn’t better than the other, and they are often indistinguishable.Some photo essays are only images, such as Walker Evans and James Agee’s classic work Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Photo journalists use this form of representation to report on events and experiences around the world. This example of Syrian women who have taken up arms captures a single idea poignantly.

Photographers, like Lauren Greenfield, uses images to illustrate our own culture, especially youth culture in America. In Fast Forward, she captures the contrast between kids growing up in Los Angeles living lives of affluence and poverty, all in a sped up world.

Some photo essays use constructed images to tell a story, as in Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, an essay illustrating how globalization, migration and rising affluence are affecting the diets of communities around the globe by focusing on 30 families in 24 countries. Each chapter of the book features a portrait of a family, photographed alongside a week’s worth of groceries. There are many images of families food shopping, cooking and eating, but the primary images are staged ~ the family in the background, and the food they eat in the foreground. Text describes the details or the week’s food, including the cost of the food.

Photo essays can also be collaborations, multiple photographers/researchers working together. High school students in LA used photography to explore immigration in their communities.

Sophisticated uses of media allow for combinations of photographs, texts, and infographics (including interactive formats), a less static form of photo essay. An excellent example of this is Segregation Now, which looks at resegregation of schools in the U.S. south, Tuscaloosa specifically.

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Narrative Analysis Tools

data analysis, methodology, narrative inquiry, publications, representation

TV Tropes is a rich wiki repository of resources described as tricks of the trade for writing fiction, but as social scientists we borrow as needed in trying to understand and explain the social world. The emphasis is on tropes, which are described as:

Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means “stereotyped and trite.” In other words, dull and uninteresting. We are not looking for dull and uninteresting entries. We are here to recognize tropes and play with them, not to make fun of them… Since a lot of art, especially the popular arts, do their best to reflect life, tropes are likely to show up everywhere.

Narrative analysis can be facilitated by looking at the tropes at the centre of the stories we are investigating, and in the section on narrative devices one can investigate a range of possibilities. Tropes are named (such as “always need what you gave up,” “dead end job,” “dramatic irony,” “fighting for survival,” “human shield,” “I just want to be normal,” “shapeshifting,” “with due respect”), a short explanation is provided and links to many examples are given.

Other sections focus on characters, plot, setting and so on.

The wiki is a rich resource, every changing, including such gems as the Periodic Table of Storytelling.

 

 

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food ~ illustrating how material culture explains many things

material culture, methodology, representation

This post is about food, really about food as a window on culture. It is meant to illustrate how something ordinary can be a powerful analytic construct. So even though this is about food, it’s not really about food, it’s an illustration of an idea.

Food is core to all cultures, it is part of the traditions, ceremonies, economics, cosmology, and social structure of any cultural group. On the surface, food is, well stuff one eats. But if that’s all it were then given our particular eco-environment we would eat whatever physically sustained us. Not true. Cultural anthropologists, food scientists, environmentalists, sociologists ~ folks often known as food scholars ~  study food as a window to cultural meanings and values. The Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition is a good place to begin exploring the meaning of food and its complex intersection with every other aspect of social life.

Food as material culture
Food can be the window to ceremonies , to eating and health (Eating Right in America), to the artisanal food movement (The Life of Cheese), to globalism (Greek Whisky: The Localization of a Global Commodity), to social solidarity (in the allegory of long spoons in many cultures, and Foods, Farms and Solidarity). Where we prepare food matters, and Emily Contois’ Not Just for Cooking Anymore: Exploring the Twenty-First-Century Trophy Kitchen illustrates that kitchens are places where food, as well as social and cultural capital, are produced.

Food as Representation
Hungry Planet: What the World Eats illustrates how globalization, migration and rising affluence are affecting the diets of communities around the globe focuses on 30 families in 24 countries. Each chapter features a family photographed alongside a week’s worth of groceries. There are many images of families food shopping, cooking and eating, but the primary images are staged ~ the family in the background, and the food they eat in the foreground. Text describes the details or the week’s food, including the cost of the food.
And, food and literature are always an interesting combination. A notable example is, of course,  Alice B. Toklas’s literary memoir disguised as a cookbook . Instructive as representation is Fictitious Dishes: An Album of Literature’s Most Memorable Meals, in which Dinah Fried cooks and photographs meals from famous fiction. Each photograph is accompanied by the passage in which the recipe or food description appears, as well as a few comments about the respective author, novel, or food.

Photographs courtesy of Dinah Fried

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ethical implications of community based participatory research

ethics, research examples

Elena Wilson is conducting research about the ethical implications of community based participatory research (CBPR), if and as experienced by the researcher. CBPR researchers may wish to read about other researchers’ experiences or contribute their own comments. More about the project at http://cbprethics.wordpress.com.

Contact: Ms Elena Wilson, PhD Candidate, La Trobe Rural Health School, Faculty of Health Sciences, e5wilson@students.latrobe.edu.au

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using time to frame data collection

methods

Time is a cross-cultural construct, although its meaning is not universal.  In any context, time is invested with metaphoric meaning illustrating its conceptual roots. In Western, industrialized cultures we speak of spending time, being on-time, answer questions about how we are using our time, think time runs out, waste time, buy time, say time is money, and use time-outs. Time is finite and commodified… not too surprising within global capitalism. In other cultures, time is marked not by its passing, but by its use… for example, Balinese conceptions of days as full or empty are connected to ritual and spiritual happenings, or by human interactions. Cultures differ in how they measure time, for example, with devices like clocks or through natural events like seasons. Edward T. Hall argued that conceptualization of differences are based upon whether one takes a mono- or poly- chronic view of time.  Monochronic conceptions see time as fixed, linear and unchanging, and polychronic conceptions see time as fluid and adaptable.

So how to use time in collecting social science data must necessarily be sensitive to cultural differences. That said, here are a few ways time can frame data collection:

24-hour recall technique: a structured interview during which the research participant reports what they did the previous day beginning at 4:00 a.m. until 4:00 a.m. the current day, estimating time intervals as closely as possible. An example is the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Americans Use of Time Project. 

time sampling: random or systematic selection of time periods for observation. This is frequently used in primarily observational studies of human activity in structured contexts, like classrooms.

life history calendars (LHC): for collecting detailed retrospective information about the timing and sequencing of events in people’s lives. While demographers use this method for collecting data on common events like marriage, divorce, childbirth, death, and so on, it also lends itself to subjectively defined life events. An example here.

 

 

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