[PEN-L:12014] Re: Swing (renamed: Surveys)

[Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 11:52 AM 8/26/97 -0700, Tom Walker wrote:

>Another problem with a result like 25% favouring socialism is that it
>doesn't tell us anything else about what the survey respondents thought.
>People also BS in ordinary conversation, but we often have enough other
>information to discount their implausible claims of church attendance or
>support for socialism. There's a funky little region of social science
>methodology called "Q-methodology" that offers a trenchant critique of
>survey research methodology and presents an alternative to the traditional
>approach.
--- sinp ---

Tom:

Thanx for sharing information on Q-methodology.  However, my critique was
aimed at any research methodology that ultimately depends on engaging the
respondent in a simulated interaction to elicit responses that are supposed
to shed light on "real life" behaviour.  This is like drawing conclusions on
the behaviour of wild animals from observations made in a zoo.  It matters
little whether the zoo confines animals to small or large cages -- it is an
artifical environment that produces different behavioral cues than a natural
one.

Aside my rather serious reservations about the validity of factor analytic
techniques (factor does not discover any patterns; at the very best, it only
tells us whether the data do not violate the researcher's preconceptions) --
my critique aims at the epistemological foundations underlying the survey
methodology, rather  than technical accuracy of this or that method of
asking questions.

Suppose that we do find a way to elicit the exact content of the R's
consciousness at a given moment in time.  But that finding is virtually
worthless, unless we make an additional assumption that the knowledge we
discovered is some kind of a benchmark, criterion that reveals to us the
"nature of human behaviour/relations." In other words, the survey-generated
knowledge can be considered valid only when we assume the existence of some
reified "human nature" "psyche" or "cognitive essence" that does not change
under different circumstances.

As soon as we assume that if there is anything like a "human nature," it is
something dynamic rather than static, interactive rather than predetermined,
and reflecting the social relations in which the individual finctions rather
than innate, essentialist psychic structures -- the survey becomes a rather
useless way of generating knowledge.  Why?  We do not have to measure the
temperature of every grain of rice in a pot of boiling water to know what
that temperature is -- suffice it to measure the temperature of their
"environment" -- i.e. boiling water.  In the same vein, we can measure the
"ideological temperature" of the environment (specific communities) to know
what individual members on average think.  Given the rabid anti-communist
propaganda that the US government and its corporate sponsored saturated this
society with, one does not need surveys to know that most people in this
country will have anti-communist sympathies.  In the same vein, one does not
need surveys to know that most Iraquis hate the US.  As Bob Dylan aptly
expressed it, "one does not need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."

But even if surveys were to tell us something that we do not already know,
what does that knowledge mean?  Suppose that we discovered that the majority
of people support this and oppose that. So what?  If circumstances change,
their opinions will like to change as well.  If, on the other hand, we treat
the survey results as given, any action, let alone policy, based on that
knowledge will necessarily have a conservative effect -- for treating the
discovered state of affairs as a "benchmark" will invariably results in
polices aiming at preserving that state against any changes.  That can be
further illustrated by an analogy to attempts to determine the "true"
position of a point on the circumference of a wheel.  Such attempts will
likely result in efforts to keep that point in its "true" (according to
whose standards?) position -- that is, to prevent the wheel from moving.

Those two points are in addtion to the "standard" critique of surveys as
asking opinions out of context, and imposing the researcher's formulation of
problems rather than eliciting the respondent's formulations (as I undertand
it, Q-methodology would fail on that account as well, for it depends on
pre-determined formulations rather than interactively elicits formulatin of Rs).

To my knowledge, a way out of that methodological conundrum was proposed by
the French sociologist Alain Touraine who used (in his studies of social
movements) a method he called 'sociological intervention' whose bastardized
version is now popular as "focus groups."  The idea here is to engage Rs in
a dialogue aimed at eliciting their views on an issue, but also  at exposing
the limitations of those views, as well as prompting the Rs to find a
solution of those limitations (BTW, this is something very similar to the
dialectical methods used by Socrates, as described in Plato's dialgues).  Of
course, the 'focus groups" bastardize this approach by focusing on the
eliciting of responses phase, while skipping the "dialectical" parts --
exposing limitations and prompting to overcome them.

But again, bourgeois social science is essentially conservative as it
ultimately upholds the status quo, its "progressive", "left wing" veneer
notwithstanding.

PS. I'm cross-posting this to the progressive sociologists list.

cheers,
wojtek sokolowski
institute for policy studies
johns hopkins university
baltimore, md 21218
sokol@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
voice: (410) 516-4056
fax:   (410) 516-8233

POLITICS IS THE SHADOW CAST ON SOCIETY BY BIG BUSINESS. AND AS LONG AS THIS
IS SO, THE ATTENUATI0N OF THE SHADOW WILL NOT CHANGE THE SUBSTANCE.
- John Dewey