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THE DIALECTICS OF CITIZENSHIP
Exploring Privilege, Exclusion, and Racialization
By Bernd Reiter Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2013Bernd Reiter
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61186-065-8
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Epistemology and Methodology of Exploratory Social Science Research
Crossing Popper with Marcuse
If you insist on strict proof (or strict disproof) in the empirical sciences, you will never benefit from experience, and never learn from it how wrong you are.
—KARL POPPER, THE LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY, 2002
This chapter seeks to propose a rationale for exploratory research in the social sciences. Inspired by the recent debates around qualitative methods (Gerring 2001; George and Bennett 2005; Brady and Collier 2004; Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003; Ragin 2008, to name just a few), I seek to demonstrate that exploratory research also has a rightful place within the social sciences. In order to live up to its potential, exploratory research needs to be conducted in a transparent, honest, and self-reflexive way—and follow a set of guidelines that ensure its reliability. Exploratory research, if conducted in such a way, can achieve great validity, and it can provide new and innovative ways to analyze reality.
In most cases, exploration demands more from the researcher than confirmatory research, both in terms of preparation and in terms of willingness and ability to expose oneself to foreign cultures and languages, as well as the courage to engage in a critical and honest self-reflection and critique. It also requires intellectual engagement with the topic at stake, far beyond the needs of those running regressions from their office computers. However, exploratory research normally demands less money to conduct, as most projects can be done by one researcher alone, without the need to mobilize, train, and pay large research apparatuses. Given the disciplinary power of elite scholars and academic institutions when it comes to selecting research through funding and hiring, exploratory research thus has great emancipatory potential, because it can escape the disciplinary power often exercised by senior "peers" and mainstream funding agencies.
To legitimize and provide a solid epistemological groundwork for exploratory research in the social sciences, it needs to be grounded in a philosophy of science, it has to be articulated within an epistemological framework, and it has to formulate a comprehensive methodological framework that justifies its methods. Thought also needs to be given to the ontology of the social sciences, as decisions about what counts as real and what we shall accept as fact necessarily impact our strategy of inquiry.
THE LIMITS OF CONFIRMATORY SOCIAL SCIENCE
Confirmatory social science dominates the field. Most social scientists use quantitative or qualitative methods in order to prove, or corroborate, their hypotheses. They expect to confirm laws, regularities, or conditionalities of the if ... then ... sort. Confirmatory research is what graduate students train for and what qualifies most researchers to get a tenure-track academic job. Confirmatory research has indeed many advantages—some of which are also very relevant for exploratory research. Confirmatory research allows for a clear formulation of a theory to be tested in its application, commonly formulated as hypotheses; it allows for bringing order into the research process by formulating theories and related hypotheses up front, and developing a research design and methodological tools best suited to address the research question, which is also formulated up front. By formulating research questions, theories, hypotheses, a research design, and a method—and by forcing the researcher to operationalize the involved terms and concepts and think of indicators to assess them—confirmatory research provides a clear scheme that is easy to follow and hence easy to teach. If trained appropriately in confirmatory research techniques, researchers know how to proceed.
By providing schematic and standardized procedures, confirmatory research also provides a mental map for how inquiry works and what it can achieve. Taking inspiration from the work of Karl Popper (2002) and Carl Hempel (1966), confirmatory research proceeds deductively by testing hypotheses. The great advantage of proceeding in such a way lies in the clear and well-structured research process that such an approach is able to secure. Mental models, ideas, or theories are compared to empirical reality and tested for their explanatory power. This allows for an isolation of an empirical domain and a focusing on one clearly delimited facet of reality. It also allows for a zeroing in on one, or a small number of potentially causal relationships and mechanisms. This is absolutely necessary for conducting any sort of empirical research, given the high complexity of reality. In reality, everything potentially relates to everything else—and without a clear theory and hypotheses, we would not be able to isolate specific causal relationships in order to analyze their strength and robustness. Theory and hypotheses allow us to simplify, isolate, and focus on particular aspects of a reality that, taken as a whole, is far too complex and contingent to be captured and explained with any degree of precision and reliability. Confirmatory research thus brings guidance and discipline into an endeavor that would otherwise be impossible and at risk of falling prey to the same kind of contingency that characterizes empirical reality.
Confirmatory research, more pragmatically, also is what society and policymakers expect social scientists to achieve, as in the end, scientists are expected to explain social reality and make predictions that help guide actions and policymaking. One normally does not get paid to speculate. With so many advantages, it comes as no surprise that confirmatory research is the only research that receives external funding and the only research taught systematically at universities, American or otherwise. But what are its weaknesses and shortcomings? Several have been identified.
When testing hypotheses, we normally are not pressed to justify where these hypotheses came from. Popper argues that asking this question is falling prey to "psychologism." After all, we need to concern ourselves not with where ideas come from, but how to assess them systematically. This, however, has led to a systematic neglect of capturing, and considering, the bias that goes into theory and hypothesis formulation. But, as such feminist scholars as Sandra Harding (1991) and Donna Haraway (1988) have convincingly argued, research cannot start from nowhere. Who we are, our interests, backgrounds, training, and culture—influence what questions we ask, how we ask them, and even what we accept as confirming evidence. Our approach to knowledge is "situated," and the worst thing to do is to pretend that it is not, thus playing the "God trick" (Haraway 1988). Thinking about, and critically analyzing, where our theories and hypotheses come from must be included in the research process, else we cannot escape unreflected bias. The need to also analyze where our ideas, theories, hypotheses, approaches, and questions come from, and how this pedigree influences our research and our conclusions, cannot be achieved with confirmatory research. This aspect of research needs to be inductive and constructivist—and it triggers the need for an altogether different approach to conducting empirical research in the social sciences.
As if this impossibility of scientifically accounting for one's location and situatedness were not enough, confirmatory research has another weakness. As Popper has made very clear, theories cannot be proved. He shows that "theories are not verifiable, but they can be corroborated" (Popper 2002: 248). Popper concludes his examination of the Logic of Scientific Discovery by stating that "The old scientific ideal of episteme—of absolutely certain, demonstrable knowledge—has proved to be an idol. The demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement must remain tentative for ever" (Popper 2002: 280). In other words, there is no way to bridge the gap that forever separates the models we formulate in our minds from empirical reality. All our theories, models, and explanations about reality will remain forever tentative, because they spring out of our own minds, and nothing can guarantee that reality conforms to our ideas. We can find laws—but nature, let alone human behavior, might not follow any laws. We might detect causal mechanisms, but we have no guarantee that history unfolds according to linear causes. Independent variables are mind constructs and not independent in reality. Dependent variables are in reality dependent on much more than the independent variables we choose to examine. All we can do—and as a consequence, all that confirmatory researchers do—is to develop highly reliable procedures and machines to process the data we feed into them. However, as reliable as our procedures have become, they are still only able to test our own ideas, theories, and hypotheses. When conducting confirmatory research, we mobilize great resources to test the fruits of our own minds—not reality.
The more precise and mathematical these methods and apparatuses, the more "scientific" they are deemed. By factoring out the human component from the research process, this research seeks to control for bias—but it fails to take into account the human impact that informs any research at the very beginning of the research process, as well as the human condition of the very phenomena it seeks to explain. Conducting contemporary confirmatory research, especially in the social sciences, is like tapping in the dark with a high-tech laser beam instead of the old-fashioned broomstick. It still leaves us clueless about what is in the room and how our own movements rearrange the objects we touch and influence our findings.
Hence, Sir Karl Popper has put a heavy burden onto the shoulders of confirmatory researchers and challenged their work on the most basic and substantial level. The truth of his assessment becomes evident when analyzing the history of our fields and critically evaluating our achievements. Confirmatory research has indeed confirmed very little. It spends most of its energy in developing and explaining new methods, computer programs, and other machines designed to ensure reliability—but the resulting reliability only applies to the methods, programs, and the machines themselves, never to the findings. Confirmatory research has become highly efficient in attesting the reliability of its own methods, but utterly unable to address the basic problems of reality.
If hard truths about reality, especially about social (that is, human) reality, are altogether out of our reach, then what can and should science, and social science in particular, do? Exploratory research offers some attractive alternatives. They rest on an explicit recognition that all inquiry is tentative; that reality is, in part, socially constructed; that researchers are part of the reality they analyze; and that the words and categories we use to explain reality grow out of our own minds and not out of reality. In other words, what we perceive and how we perceive it has more to do with us than with the reality we observe. Explicitly taking all these factors into account and thus debunking the myth of the possibility of neutral, objective, and value-free research, exploratory social science offers a different research program altogether—one that recognizes the importance, and indeed necessity, of philosophy for social-science research, and one that draws the necessary conclusions from the foundations philosophy has laid out.
THE TENTATIVENESS OF INQUIRY
If "hard" deductive science can only achieve tentative findings and statements whose truths cannot be attested, then we have good reason to reconsider induction. Induction is prone to be incomplete and faulty, as a whole Western tradition of philosophy has demonstrated. However, as it turns out, deduction is equally unable to lead us to "the truth." Worse, while focusing our attention on methodology, deduction makes us overlook the very important problem of situatedness and leaves many crucial assumptions routinely made by researchers unexplained. Deductive, confirmatory research thus throws out the baby with the bathwater. Inductive, exploratory research offers a way to save the baby by admitting, up front, that the kind of knowledge it is able to achieve is partial and tentative.
Observations always run the risk of being incomplete and missing important events, and we have no assurance that the world unfolds uniformly, thus permitting us to learn from the past. However, we have good reason to assume that the world unfolds regularly, and if we assume that, then we can learn from past events. If the world stops unfolding in a regular way, catastrophe is the most likely trigger, and we will not need any social science anymore. In the meantime, we can assume uniformity.
Admitting to the tentativeness of findings and explanations of reality translates into making nonexclusive claims about reality. If our theories and hypotheses about the world cannot bridge the gap that separates them from reality, and if those theories and hypotheses have more to do with our own mental, social, and cultural situatedness, then our theories and ideas only allow us to make sense of the world for ourselves. Theory-driven empirical research—and all research is theory-driven—allows the researcher to explain reality so it makes sense to him or her. If successful, an explanation provides a fruitful and plausible way to look at and explain reality that also makes sense to others. It can never be the only possible way to explain it. This, then, leads to a more humble formulation of claims about reality and how reality "really" is. Instead of advancing arguments that make claims to be exclusive truths, exploratory research provides more or less plausible and hence fruitful ways to examine and explain reality that can be shared, if successful and plausible, after a critical evaluation. In this way, competing and even rival explanations can coexist. This does not automatically lead to relativism. In exploratory research, there are better and worse explanations. What are the criteria?
Good and valid explanations in exploratory research are those that are able to demonstrate the robustness and plausibility of the link that connects a stipulated cause to an effect. If I can demonstrate how exactly investment in education led to economic growth in a given country over a given period of time, then I am doing a good job at explaining this claim, while being aware that education is not the only cause for economic growth. Exploring the relationship between education and economic growth thus means revealing and unveiling the causal mechanisms that connect one to the other. This can only be achieved by formulating theories and hypotheses up front.
A PRIORI THEORIZING
The advantages of a priori theorizing and hypothesizing explained above apply equally to exploratory research. There is no theory-free perception of the world, because we can only relate to the world by applying our own mental categories, words, and frameworks. We simply do not see those things we do not understand. Hence, a pure exploration that starts from scratch is impossible. It could only be achieved by someone analyzing a world unrelated and disconnected—thus not ours. Exploratory research, similar to confirmatory research, thus needs to start from an explicitly formulated theory and clear and precise hypotheses. Different from confirmatory research, however, exploratory research does not set out to test these hypotheses, because they cannot be tested and proved to begin with, as Popper has shown. Instead, exploratory research asks how much a given theory and a derived hypothesis can explain, and how well it can explain it, or how much sense this explanation makes. Exploratory research is successful if a previously formulated theory and hypothesis explains a lot, or if it explains very little but explains it very well, thus providing a very valid explanation by elucidating a very strong connection linking a cause to an outcome. In addition, exploratory research seeks to provide new and previously overlooked explanations, and it can do so by actively engaging the researcher in a process of amplifying his or her conceptual tools and allowing him or her to pose new questions and provide new explanations by looking at reality from a new angle. If research depends critically on our own mental models, available categories, theories, and concepts, then better research can be achieved by amplifying the mental analytical repertoire of the researcher. This process is one rightfully called "conscientization." It is strongly and directly related to education, more precisely the German Bildung—that is, general, historical, reflexive understanding.
To provide a more detailed and complete introduction to exploratory research in the social sciences, I will focus on some of the aspects highlighted above in more detail, and provide some examples to illustrate this approach.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE DIALECTICS OF CITIZENSHIP by Bernd Reiter. Copyright © 2013 by Bernd Reiter. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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