Class 8. October 30. Understanding local community 2: ethnography, in-depth interviewing, and community power analysis
Methods: inventorying and investigating community organizations and institutions; using participant observation and in-depth interviewing in field work; identifying and observing elites, developing a community power analysis.
(Friday, November 1: Prof. Gutman out of town)
Experts: William Kornblum (ethnography) GC Sociology Emeritus, Prof. Kathleen Gerson (in-depth interviewing) NYU Sociology Department
Readings or applications:
Stéphane Tonnelat and William Kornblum, “Walking to the Stations, Code Switching, and the I-We-You Shift,” chapter 3 in International Express: New Yorkers on the 7 Train (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
Danny L. Jorgensen, “Participant Observation,’ in Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences (John Wiley Online, 2015)
Kathleen Gerson (forthcoming) chapter on in-depth interviewing
John Mollenkopf, “Who (or What) Runs Cities, and How?” Sociological Forum 4:1 (1989):119-137.
Review these resources:
Community power analysis handouts
The readings for this week brought us into the minds of ethnographers and in-depth interviewers as they collect data from participant observations, interviews, and specific site locations. I was especially taken by the methods employed in Kornblum’s International Express. The go-along interview style seems like a fascinating way to learn and record data about how people experience their daily lives and routines. When thinking about our case site, an interesting study might be a comparison of the walk in Gowanus for those who live in public housing versus those who live in some of the new glass buildings. What’s the difference in the lived experience. Where do each of these groups use words like “we” as opposed to “you.” I hadn’t yet considered the importance of studying word choice in particular moments in addition to the content of a response.
I also appreciated the Gerson and Damaske article for reading and serving as a manual for in-depth interviews. In what feels like a past life, I became really interested and engaged in the process of recording and writing oral histories. Much of the strategies suggested in The Science and Art of Interviewing are ones that I had used in my oral history interviews. I know I am happiest in an interview session when it teeters the line with therapy session (of course, I fully acknowledge that I am not equipped to provide any kind of therapy nor is it my role). But the point is that you want to make your subject feel comfortable enough that he/she can feel vulnerable in sharing their personal experiences and sometimes this can become emotional. In addition, Gerson and Damaske make a point of emphasizing that good interviews require a lot of preparation work in order to ensure that they are as successful as possible.
Finally, as a fiend for New York City politics, I deeply enjoyed John’s chapter on How to Study Urban Political Power. I remember reading this last semester before studying for the first exam. It was a lot of fun to revisit it after the exam with greater knowledge of the different political scientists and theories that he explores throughout the piece. This should be required reading for any class focused on urban politics (and I am sure it is!). In particular, the following sentence speaks volumes to me: “[The] tendency to trivialize politics removes a way to explain why outcomes vary even though capitalism is constant” (36). This idea flipped on its head my understanding of the imperative for cities to be as amenable as possible to businesses in order to survive. While the forces of capitalism can often feel all-encompassing, especially in cities, it is critical to remember that democratic governments are not just subject to market forces but also to political accountability (such as through contested elections). In addition, keeping Weber in mind, since the state has a monopoly over the use of force, it is not enough to just accept the state as powerless in the face of capitalism.
When reading through the posts already shared this week, I realize that Rebecca and I share a lot of similar questions in thinking about qualitative and ethnographic methods in the context of our class’s research on Gowanus. I also really appreciate your comments, Rebecca, and bringing Weber into this discussion (as my Theory class is right after this one!).
In Gerson and Demaske, the approach to collecting and interpreting depth interviews demonstrates how wide a range of research the method can accomplish, in a way that is often unreachable by quantitative and each other qualitative methods. I’m curious to hear from Kornblum though on how the go-along method varies from traditional interview with regard to the depth of the outcome. For example, the familiar setting yet very public and mobile process, I expect, would yield a more instinctual and perhaps unedited response to the surroundings. These findings work for the goals presented in the chapter on the habitual linguistic shifts as the respondents move through space. In what other scenarios is this method most appropriate, as compared to a more formal, structured interview as described in Gerson?
As we take these lessons back to Gowanus, I am thinking about the locations where we have had our conversations (interviews). Typically in a place chosen by the speaker, and on their terms. The same will be true for the NYCHA meeting that we have planned next week, if I recall correctly. Just to think about our product and method of potentially incorporating some spatial elements, Would experimenting with moving through the neighborhood, potentially not with as large of a group, yield more spontaneous results on visual queues and memories of the neighborhood? How would neighborhood and social boundaries become visible through these narratives? In which cases (if any) would this be something useful to our project? If moving forward with this style, (how) does it change the recruitment process for respondents?
Excellent point about the “go alongs” from Gowanus Houses versus 365 Bond Street. Also appreciate the comment about my chapter. Have been thinking about revisiting the topic one of these days, so any suggestions for improvement would be welcome.
This comment meant both for Rebecca and Ali.
I’ve conducted most of my own interviews in and around public administrations in South Africa. These – due to a process of politicization that has for various historical reasons been exceptionally uncoupled from and erosive of technical expertise – are experiencing severe operational problems, internal conflict, and corruption. It is the sort of situation that lots of powerful people have an interest in not disclosing.
What that has meant for me is that formal-epistemological and -ethical considerations have tended to fall by the way side. Access is very contingent. Sampling procedures breaks down on this contingency. One comes to rely on people who can vouch for you with other people. That sort of snowballing is heavily defined by people’s shared backgrounds, world views, and interests, which means that one tends to be channeled down specific networks and organizational grooves. I find that reading those interests, especially, is important to finding ways to correct the research process. There have been times when the way has been paved by political operators who know what it means to control a narrative. Others, generally the best sources of information, are angry enough (and, as Rebecca broaches above, in need of therapy enough) to say everything they known, but they too are not without their biases and their own limitations of access. One can, practically-speaking, approach the inner sanctum only after the fact or obliquely, by finding people that are now removed from politics or by hanging around in bars and such that are frequented by politicians and “making friends.”
Ethically-speaking, I never tell people what I’m researching. People have been assassinated for threatening to disclose the kinds of things that I come across. I’m probably too tied into the elite public sphere and (to be frank) too white for that to be a reasonable move. There would be mediatised scandal and the perpetrators would get a lot of unwanted attention. People, however, that get a sense as to what I’m up to have a large number of other tools at their disposal. Actually, a major one is research ethics. More than once, especially in larger municipalities that retain their own research units, I’ve opened channels of access only soon after to have a research manager thrown at me, armed with a bureaucratic process beefed up with enough months of proposal-writing and authorizations to run out my own resources and timeframes. I’m not sure whether universities and such have fully considered the extent to which their research ethics protocols run up against broader considerations of public interest. I’ve fostered a strong preference for hewing towards the latter.
Another substantive but somewhat disparate thought occurred to me when reading this week. Methodological texts in the social science strike me as being strangely disconnected from the fundamental philosophy of the sciences. The texts still draw a basic distinction between cause and meaning, between explanation and interpretation, between the methodologies of positivism and interpretivism. That is very strange in itself on a moments reflection: social facts are necessarily meaningful, all meaning is socially causative.
There is, more broadly, an old and actually quite profound philosophical problem that underpins the distinction. Both positivism and interpretivism, I suspect a case can be made, emerge historically from the sort of overblown empiricism of Bacon, inflected through Hume and Kant respectively. These argue, drawing very different implications, that all that we have access to are sense impressions, so that the status of the world beyond them is in some way unknowable. Causation for Hume becomes the constant conjunction of the positivist statistician. Meaning, following the idealists that followed Kant, turns in contemporary times inter alia into the astonishing proposition that we don’t exist in one reality but, in Jorgensen’s words, a “multiplicity of realities,” and where for Gerson and Damaske “truth” comes in scare quotes with “subjective” layers and dimensions.
Let’s leave aside whether those last statements are ethically available in an era where they are increasingly mobilized by Power against ordinary people, an era of “fake news” and “alternative facts.” More theoretically, most philosophers of science would today agree that this all involved a bit of a wrong turn. The basic reason is that all of the authors mentioned above allow their theory about how they know things to define for them what there is. Things beyond experience, they hold, are not there or it isn’t useful to talk about them. Yet science proceeds precisely by positing entities beyond experience – the atom was an example. How we know something doesn’t determine what there is, what there is determines how we can know about it. Put aphoristically, epistemology doesn’t precede ontology, ontology precedes epistemology.
The implications of getting that wrong are multitudinous and vast swathes of the social science remain afflicted. There is lots to do for a methodologist who sets about correcting that.
Wow, these are some really interesting and momentous observations. I am going to have to think about them, but also wish you would spell out the “lots to do” required to develop a methodology that did not prejudge would could be learned by how we know we learn things. In order to develop a methodology that was open to things beyond or nonconforming to our system(s) of interpretation and understanding. Drawing on Kuhn and pragmatism, I would say that we have a chance to learn beyond our comfortable frames when our understanding-system repeatedly breaks down or fails to account for something, but you seem to want a lot more than that.
Like Rebecca, I am also quite taken by the “go-along” method in Intl Express, especially given its focus on a dimension that our seminar focuses on – the importance of place(s) – that seems to be neglected somewhat in the two “how to” readings. The go-along, in being attentive to the “site-specific” aspect of the interviewee’s responses and reflections, generates insights about (perceptions of) place that may be missed in a more “sit down” interview. (I am also impressed that so much can be gleaned from the varying uses of the linguistic pronomial shifters – we/I vs you – by the interviewees.)
While the “site” of the participant observation may contribute site-specific insights, the dynamic, “on the go” multi-site nature of go-along seems ideally suited to capture the interviewees’ perceptual shifts that may well be operating at a level below intentionality and awareness.
I do have a few reservations about the go-along as presented: these interviews seem to be operating in a tight timetable, in a period of minutes, taken from the interstitial flow of a hurrying commuter. The two-person setup (one to videotape) is an acknowledgement of the need to capture what is otherwise somewhat rushed, for analysis in a less exigent “post-production” review. What applies to the interviewer may also apply to the interviewee – i am concerned about the quality and representativeness of their responses on what is a prelude to their morning commute. I speak as someone who doesn’t “get going” until later in the day and is operating on semi-autopilot on the morning commute!
Ryan’s post gives us much to ponder on research ethics in situations where the potential interviewees/observed (and the chain of contacts leading to potential interviewees) are embroiled in complex power games and also, given the interpretivist framework that most of the readings this week are working within, the vastly underrated processes of positivistic methodology.
Behind the interview project of International Express and the method of “walking interviews” is a unique claim in social science methods: people’s thoughts, as they relate to space, matter. Not their votes, not their formal views, not their survey answers, but their perceptions and how they change through space. Meaning is made from the interviews similar to a close reading of literature – which struck me as particularly true regarding the close look at pronouns (at what point did the interviewee transition their subject from “we” or “I” to a general “you”), but also requires significant background knowledge to uncover coded statements about race and class. For example, they quote someone describing “74th Street (‘Indian Street’)” as being to crowded to walk on. He describes it similarly to how I describe 34th Street in Manhattan and why I don’t like walking down the crowded street. While my statement might betray a bias against shopping tourists, George’s comment has ethnic groups embedded into the space he inhabits.
I also love the idea that there’s a sort of familiar bubble within some very short distance of one’s home that is distinct from what is commonly understood as a neighborhood. “Neighborhood” is used to describe units of space in both urban and suburban contexts, and is used by people of all stations in life and politics. But there is a sub-unit below the formal neighborhoods and this is what shifted interviewees’ perspectives. I wonder how this is different near different types of subway stations – i.e. major hubs vs. local stops – or even above-ground vs. below ground, neighborhoods dominated by busses, etc…