Social science and wanting to be wrong

You're the only person who can tell me the truth

The three broad categories of academic disciplines are the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences.

The sciences are what you think they are. It’s all that delicious STEM-y stuff that federal funding agencies love to salivate over. They focus on objects and ideas that are not generated by human consciousness. Even if you’re studying a bridge made by humans, you’re really studying physics and materials science. Of course, you can also study a bridge from an aesthetic perspective, at which point is becomes enters the realm of arts and humanities.

The humanities are also what you think they are. They may not bring in the big grant dollars, but they form the backbone of the traditional “liberal arts,” which every American university acknowledges as important on some level. They examine the products of human consciousness. You look at books and ideas and acts generated by humans and seek to learn from those products.

The social sciences are somewhere in between. They are often informally defined by what they aren’t. They are not sufficiently “hard” to be called sciences because they deal with human experience and feeling. But they’re also not sufficient as “arts” due to their preference for quantification and metricization of the internal realm of consciousness.

I want to think about a few things I’ve learned about the social sciences in my program and maybe break down some of the mythos.

The explicit and the implicit

I would call a social science a field of study in which people use analytical tools to examine the experience of human cognition. These fields often overlap because while education and political science, for example, have different areas of focus, they both examine how people make choices and respond to stimuli.

Now, you can study people without being a social scientist. Economists are also interested in how people make decisions, though they tend to focus on what is externally observable (purchasing patterns, zip code, wealth) instead of things that can’t be observed externally (feelings, impressions, goals).

Anything that is externally observable, we might call explicit because it is comprehensible in itself, at least at one level of analysis. If you were born in a certain zip code, no amount of feeling or belief can change that fact. Your birth was externally observable and its having happened is unchanging.

This goes for human behavior too. If I smile when you walk in the room, it’s already explicit and evident that I did smile at you. But human behavior is complex because the fact of my smiling does not tell you why I was smiling. The reasons behind human action are implicit. I may know why I smiled, but you don’t. The work of the social scientist is making explicit that which is implicit.

Now, we all do this every day. You walk in a room, and I smile at you. You may conclude “He’s happy to see me.” Or you may think “He’s laughing at me because he thinks I look stupid.” Or “He’s grimacing in pain!” Or “There must be someone behind me that he’s happy to see.”

The interpretations can go on endlessly. Any social act where one person relates to another has to be interpreted. The act is explicit, but its meaning remains implicit. Most of the time, we operate under the assumption that our interpretations align with the intentions of the people we observe. Social science seeks to investigate those interpretations.

Quantitative social translation

Social scientists approach this process in a variety of ways. The use of surveys is incredibly common. You could craft a list of statements that say things like “When I smile at someone, it’s because I am happy to see them” and list a series of options one a range from “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree.” These “Likert scale” surveys are a common way to assess individual and group attitudes. You’ve definitely taken one before.

Social scientists will use other questions too. Any which involve selecting a pre-written response can be easily quantified. Even written responses can be quantified by tallying key words and themes. This kind of analysis operates on the assumption that observing enough people, asking the right questions, and quantifying their responses for purposes of comparison will lead to a true understanding of cognition and intention.

Qualitative member checking

The other approach social scientists can take is the qualitative one. If a survey gains legitimacy by asking the same questions to lots of people, qualitative inquiry gains legitimacy by asking different questions to a few people. Its priority is depth over breadth.

This typically consists of observation or interviews with a person about a topic of interest. The researcher goes into the experience with things they hope to learn about how a person understand some aspect of their world. The goal is to help that person talk through their experience to make explicit the things that are implicit to them.

Perhaps they’ve never thought about why they smile when a friend walks in the room; it was just an obvious response. The researcher is there to ask pointed questions in pursuit of meaning, to collaborate with a person whose consciousness they wish to explore.

This is a labor-intensive process, so the researcher can’t do it with hundreds of people. But what they will produce is a detailed transcript of a conversation with one person or a record of observing that person. The researcher can then annotate the record to try to suss out implications, explain non-verbal gestures, and theorize on the participant’s broader perspective.

But this is the point at which good qualitative practice diverges from the bad. Once the researcher puts all their conclusions together, they share it with the person they were studying.

This is member checking, and it’s essential because it changes the relationship of researcher and subject. Instead of the researcher standing at a distant remove and telling someone, “This is why you think X,” they act as a collaborator who asks the question “Is this why you think X?” If the participant thinks that the researcher’s assessment is off-base, then they pick up the process again and iterate on their work to dig toward a meaning that the researcher can express which makes explicit the feelings to which the participant has not put words.

Perhaps one way to think about this is with the metaphor of stand-up comedy. While this is a more hierarchical relation between performer and audience, it is still more relational than most performance. The stand-up comedian’s project is to put into words things their audience has not thought before. This is making explicit the implicit. The audience can member check the comedian’s assessment with their laughter. Laughing indicates “Yes, you have put the right words to it.” Not laughing indicates “No, those words do not connect to my experience.”

The qualitative researcher, then, is engaged in a project of individualized stand-up comedy.

The Sage on a Stage

Trust me; I know things

I think this shift in the balance of power is really important. Member checking is an act of humility. Many would-be scholars are afraid to do it because it subjects them to the potential of being incorrect.

It’s worth stating at more length, but so much of what goes on in the academy is about preemptive defense. It’s about fear.

When scholars construct mathematical models to interpret survey results, they find an audience because the fact that the results are metricized appears to give them legitimacy. It’s harder to argue with because the result gives a number to a feeling, and numbers feel like proof. Numbers don’t invite conversation because they’re an abstraction from ideas, not an idea in itself. Scholars construct their models to be statistically significant as a battlement against contradiction. The best results are those that preempt conversation.

Even in more qualitative studies, it’s very easy for scholars to keep participants and readers at a distance. This is why researchers will use “frameworks” or “lenses.” By saying something like “By viewing this response through a post-structuralist lens, we can see that…” the scholar divorces themselves from participant accountability. If the individual doesn’t see themselves represented in that statement, it’s not the scholar’s fault. The issue is that they aren’t capable of using the same theoretical framework as the researcher is.

Relying on the artifice of a theoretical framework allows the scholar to gain secondhand legitimacy from other scholars. If other people have written papers that have gained disciplinary relevance, then aligning your work with theirs means yours is legitimate by extension.

In the same way, relying on a named perspective like “post-positivism” or “grounded theory” or “post-modernism” is a cover for authentic human connection. Scholars will assert that they are aligned with some interpretive camp before making a statement such that any contradiction can be disregarded since it comes from outside the lens in question.

Walk boldly into curiosity

The way to perform authentic research, in my view, is to study without fear. Instead of using endeavoring to prevent contradiction, beg to be contradicted.

Many doctoral students operate from a place of imposter syndrome, which I’ve written about before. It’s essentially a deficit mindset in which we operate out of a fear of being exposed as incompetent. That is the same kind of preemptive defensiveness I described earlier, and it’s a fear that is easy to carry with you your whole career. Scholars go to great lengths to obfuscate and insulate such that they can’t be contradicted. This is just a matured fear of being found illegitimate or inadequate or incompetent.

The only alternative is to openly admit your ignorance. Instead of hoping desperately that it never gets exposed, the social scientist can preemptively expose it. We want to learn; we don’t have any answers.

This eliminates the false hierarchy in which many scholars operate. If they cannot lay claim to being “the one who knows,” then they lose their ability to assert down to “the ones who don’t know.” Scholars have very little power and authority in the world, so it’s scary to feel like you’re losing what little you had.

(By the way, this knower-learner hierarchy also informs many scholars’ teaching styles which can alienate and infantilize their students.)

By disavowing the pretense of authority, the social scientist can learn something from a peer in a way they never could from a mere “subject.” What you can learn is how they see the world in a way that can be translated between people yet still fits with their own understanding of themselves.

At its best, this kind of social research can be liberating for both researcher and participant in a way few other approaches can. Both parties learn things about each other and about themselves. They can put words to an experience for the first time. No one gets told what they feel because both parties keep checking for understanding to ensure they’re on the same page.

I hope to be someone who can learn from people without the fear of being told I’m wrong.

I hope I keep discovering that I’m wrong every time.

-Matt