Originally Posted by Mongrel
Pish and Tosh
It's Friday night
Saturday to come
Why?
In the people sciences I think it would be more accurate to say it demands an attempt to neutralise the observer but in many Discussions acknowledges only partial success. Does that make it null and void as science?Science does demand neutralising the impact of the observer...
Wouldn't this depend on whether or not it is trying to claim a scientific standard? I may choose to ask a person their motives and to put the information to use without verification from another observer; however if I generalised from that one person to a whole population or suggested my memory was entirely objective then I would be making mistakes.Even in qualitative research reproducibility of main findings by several independent observers should be a minimum standard.
Again it comes back to not confusing one thing with another, not trying to validate information or opinion by attaching words like research and science but still being able to gather and use information.
There's a whole area of study (she said, avoiding the word research quite deliberately!) called autoethnography which not only acknowledges the subjective quality of individual experience but uses attempts at openess to delve into it as deeply as possible. On the one hand I think it's navel gazing in the extreme, on the other I can't help but admit it does what it says on the tin!
So where would skeptics stand on meta cognition and self awareness?
Floppit
http://anthropology.usf.edu/cma/CMAmethodology-ae.htm
Introduction to Autoethnography
Ellis and Bochner (2000) advocate authoethnography, a form of writing that "make[s] the researcher's own experience a topic of investigation in its own right" (p. 733) rather than seeming "as if they're written from nowhere by nobody" (p. 734). Autoethnography is "an autobiographical genre of writing that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural" (p. 739); autoethnographers "ask their readers to feel the truth of their stories and to become coparticipants, engaging the storyline morally, emotionally, aesthetically, and intellectually" (p. 745).
Not sure what to make of this, but science it is not. Absolutely agree that neutralizing the observer bias is an aspiration rather than always the reality, but the quality of the results should always be assessed with this in mind. Empiricism demands reproducibility of findings by other observers.
Thus I would contend that any 'research' or 'study' that blatantly fails to attempt to deal with this issue should be filed under fiction/biography, even humanities such as history attempt to minimise such bias. I would make one exception - analysis of observer bias itself.
Social anthropologists have always struggled with the issue of observer bias and/or observer influence (if I'm studying behaviour how do I know those being studied aren't changing their behaviour becuase of my presence - plus secret observation raises some tricky moral issues).
Some behaviours (e.g. shopping) are easier to study as they produce a set of data (whether you bought and what you bought) that is more independent of the observer's presence.
One of the most widely used social anthropological research methods is Participant_observation which has the benefit of usually being longitudinal. However it doesn't lend itself to numerical analysis particularly well.
Marketers have long studied consumer behaviour using very large datasets generated by mass surveys or supermarket scanning data. However, there are some interesting and highly questionable outcomes from analysis of these very large sets (this one was done delibarately to make just this point - trouble is some folk think Vince was being serious about the astrology!):
Mitchell, V.-W. and Haggett, S., 1997, ‘Sun-Sign Astrology in Market Segmentation: An Empirical Investigation’, Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol.14, No.2. pp.112-128, June.
Pebble, I certainly wasn't suggesting that autoethnography was science, actually I don't think even it's most strident supporters would suggest that! The question is more whether something can be learned from it, or perhaps to be less contentious in one sense, can you learn from biography?
Whether travelling or working with people from different cultures if I want to learn about a place one of the methods I use is to read fiction/biography by authors of that culture. When I've checked out face to face what I've learn from fiction it has often been the most useful information I can access. It would have been hard for me to learn elsewhere that a sniff in Sri Lanka means disapproval or a sense of what happened inside neighbourhoods as civil war broke out. If I hear a few stories about 'face' in China my sense of what it means deepens. I'm not sure if I'm wording this in the clearest way but it's as near as I can get in a short space of time to explaining why I find the non science interesting, thoughtful and valid - as long as it isn't confused with science. If I was working to encourage Chinese farmers to use a new weedkiller I would certainly read a few novels!
Tim - I think one of the interesting aspects of any social/person study can be the freedom to take information from a wide variety of study types; from behaviourism and it's functional analysis to autoephnography with it's rich biography. It starts to get exciting when one begins to feed the other. Especially post Google Scholar (God bless Google and all who sail in her!).
Never come across Google Scholar before - thanks for the tip ...
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