Give Methods A Chance

In this episode, we talk with Stefano Bloch. Stefano is an urban geographer specializing in social and spatial theory, cultural criminology, and subcultures. He is currently a Presidential Diversity Fellow in Urban Studies at Brown University. Stefano joins us to reflect on his use of personal autobiography as a source of data and methodological asset. In particular, he turns to his own experience as a member of the graffiti subculture when researching the destruction of the LA Olympic freeway murals by writers over the last 30 years. Stefano’s article on the subject titled “Why Grafitti Writers Write on Murals” is forthcoming in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 

“So often I hear students say the same few things. One of which is, “well, I’m from such a boring area and nothing happened there—we were so monotonous in the way we lived our lives, I didn’t do anything”. And, I remind them, if what they mean by boring is the traditional suburban, homogeneous enclave in the middle of Connecticut, that is, in fact, a revolution in the way in which people have lived. You know, the family with two-parents, two-point-seven kids, the dog, and the attached garage is a rich source of data…You need to de-familiarize your own upbringing. There is no such thing as boring.”

In this episode, we talk with Vincent Roscigno, sociologist at The Ohio State University, about using multiple methods to research historical inequality. Using the case of the Sioux Massacre at Wounded Knee, he ultimately answers empirical and theoretical questions about how powerful state actors justify inequality. Using archives, correspondence, and qualitative and quantitative analyses, Vinnie and his research team found that officials of the Office of Indian Affairs and federal politicians amplified ethnocentric and threat frames, using the Sioux Ghost Dance as central to this argument. Force against the Sioux was consequently portrayed as justifiable, which increased the likelihood of the massacre. This unique project sheds light on the value in using multiple approaches to answer a sociological question.

“I engage in quantitative work. I engage in qualitative work. But, increasingly my work has taken on a multimethod flavor. I feel more confident when I can pull off this blending of methods… I think in some ways, questions of validity are what pushed me to become more of a multimethod researcher. I think that various types of qualitative approaches [to supplement quantitative analyses] can both give us confidence in the validity of the variables we tend to choose, as well as bolster our confidence in the interpretation of what that relationship is… For me, this type of sociology is poignant. It’s powerful. It puts a human face on some of the processes we talk about in the abstract.“

In this episode, we talk with Kathryn Henne, a Senior Research Fellow at the Regulatory Institutions Network, an interdisciplinary research center housed at the Australian National University. We discuss Kathryn’s experience conducting multi-sited fieldwork for her book Testing for Athlete Citizenship: Regulating Doping and Sex in Sport.

“This approach seeks to provide a nuanced understanding of how those localized and observable settings are conditioned, but also connected by those globalized dynamics which may not appear at first sight when you are in one particular site. So it really allows us to trace those processes and movements using qualitative methods.”

In this episode, we talk with Justin Picket of SUNY-Albany about using web-based surveys for public opinion polling and experiments. He provides guidance, tips, and tricks for using services like Amazon Mechanical Turk.

“A lot of people have great ideas, and they just don’t have the resources to go out and go a longitudinal study. Giving people the tools to initially test their idea and get it out there can really benefit science….it opens the theorizing and the research to broader set.”

In this episode, we are joined by co-authors David Scott FitzGerald, Associate Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California at San Diego and David Cook-Martín, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Grinnell College and director of its Center for International Studies. We discuss the historical, comparative approach that the two employed in their book Culling the Masses: The Democratic Origins of Racist Immigration Policy in the Americas, for which they conducted analysis of legal records of twenty-two countries between 1790 and 2010.

“Getting access to the so-called hidden transcripts, as James Scott would call them, was difficult. That was something that came out of our archival work. We didn’t set out expecting to find the volume of such secret confidentials that we came up with. Some of the more exciting archival research that we did was to uncover some documents that had never been reported before in either the English or Spanish language literature. For example, there are some confidential restrictions on Chinese in Mexico that I found in the archives in Mexico City, where some of the documents were written partially in cypher. Then I found other documents that de-coded that and showed that it referred specifically to Chinese. David found some similar documents that have never been written about before in the archives in Argentina.”

Alice Goffman’s ethnographic foray into a black neighborhood in inner city Philadelphia has attracted attention both inside and outside of academia. While On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City was a critical success and Goffman was initially celebrated for her accounts of over-policing and over-criminalization, questions are now being raised about the accuracy of Goffman’s accounts, her participation in illegal activities, and the claims made in the book. Today, Douglas Hartmann, Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, President of the Midwest Sociological Society, and co-editor of The Society Pages joins us to discuss lessons that can be learned from the attention the book has received as well as the larger implications for sociologists and urban ethnographers.

“What’s a good ethnography? There is not a single answer to that. The reason there is not a single answer is because there is a number of different questions and goals that ethnographers can take on…On the one hand, what are the goals and objectives that the researcher him or herself has and try to evaluate the work on those terms. And then, there is another set of terms on what else do we want to learn from that project. That is a different set of standards.”

In this episode, we talk with Daniel Winchester, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Purdue University. Dan joins us to discuss ethnographic research. In particular, Dan explains the value of ethnographic research for better understanding religious conversion and cultural practice.

“How do you get access to people’s lives, people’s experiences, people’s feelings? Of course, you can never do that completely. You don’t become a mind reader. One of the things you do get some insight into by participating in the life of community, is how participating in particular types of activities, and involving yourself in particular types of social relations, change the way people understand and experience the world. And, part of the way you understand that is by doing those things yourself.”

In this episode we discuss an innovative methodological approach to understanding reflexivity and identity when doing ethnographic fieldwork. We talk with Elizabeth Cherry, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Manhattanville College, who collaborated with fellow ethnographers Michaela DeSoucey, Assistant Professor of Sociology at North Carolina State University and Colter Ellis, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Montana State University.

We discuss their article, “Food for Thought, Thought for Food: Consumption, Identity and Ethnography,” published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (JCE). This article brings together their field experiences studying animal rights, local food production, and cattle ranching and examines how those experiences re-shaped their own food consumption practices.

For anyone who is interested in being able to defend their claims and say that the research that they gathered was at the very least valid and that they know they were getting answers to the questions they asked, this is a good way to gauge the extent to which you as an individual may have affected the data collection process…. It’s interesting to see the ways in which our identities might shape what we find. It’s a good added methodological tool.

Bonus podcasts! Check out Colter Ellis on TSP’s Office Hours Podcast to learn more about his work on beef production and labor and Michaela DeSoucey on TSP’s Office Hours Podcast to learn more about her work on food and cultural authenticity.

In this episode, we are joined by Shamus Khan, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Professor Khan studies cultural sociology and stratification, with a strong focus on elites. He is the author of Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School and The Practice of Research. We discuss using historical data for his new research project, in which he uses the New York Philharmonic archives to uncover the character of their subscribers from the 1870s to the present.

“I love very micro-level analyses where you can see what one person is doing or what is happening on the ground…It is super exciting to see where did the Vanderbilts sit, who was sitting around them, and what kind of things they were listening to…The main advantage of this methodological approach to me, is that I find it really exciting. It is not hard for me to get up and go to my office everyday to do something like this because, as time consuming as it is, I get to really know something that happened, and I am able to document it and provide a really clear account of what was going on in what is often a cloudy past.”

In this special edition of Give Methods a Chance, we talk with Chris Uggen to get context and insight to a recent retraction of a political science article in Science and the resulting public discourse around the study under question.

“Outright fraud, where people make up data, is likely to be exceedingly rare–in part because it is not sustainable over a long term. As academics, we rely on our professional reputation. So you might be able to get a paper published, which might even get you a job, but, long term, it just isn’t in anyone’s interest to falsify data.”