What do you mean by “research”?

When discussing research methods, there are a number of barriers to overcome in the ways that my students think about research. One is the frequent use of the word “experiment” as a generic term for “study.” Although that is annoying, and some students still do it after a semester of methods training, I’ve found that it is even more difficult to reconcile students’ various uses of the term “research.”

In high school and some college departments, a research paper is one in which you combine information from several sources into a single paper. In this context, “research” consists of the gathering of sources, likely from Jstor and other electronic databases. Within sociology, I think that these papers are better conceptualized as literature reviews or review papers. In contrast to my students, I think of research as the collection and analysis of data, though even this is complicated by the fact that many sociologists who use existing surveys will never collect their own data.

Due to this terminological confusion, there must be at least a few students who enroll in research methods courses wondering how many ways there are to search Jstor and why they have to spend an entire semester learning to do so. Discovering that they will spend a semester discussing ways to collect and analyze data must be a shock!

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Students, get your shit together

The Add/Drop deadline for students at my school is two weeks into the semester. It was roughly the same at my previous institution. I’m not sure whether it is something about the students at my new institution or just the fact that I’m teaching Introduction to Sociology again for the first time in several years, but this year I received more requests to enroll in my class during this time period than I ever remember having before. About 2/3 of them came in the second week of the Add/Drop period, some at the end of the week, which meant that they wanted to enroll after missing two of 15 weeks, the first assignment, and over 100 pages of reading. I nicely explained this to them as my reason for denying their requests.

I know that some students cannot register when they are supposed to due to payment issues or academic probation, but it seems that at least some students must be treating the first two weeks of class as a trial period for their courses before determining if they will commit to a full semester. A few advisors also seem to be dropping the ball, suggesting that students change courses long after the spring advising sessions, though it is possible that students just didn’t show up for spring advising. The annoyance of all of this is probably increased by the fact that I never changed my schedule after the beginning of the semester during my own college days.

Of course, the most likely explanation is that the sheer awesomeness of sociology and, beyond that, my teaching of sociology spread like wildfire through the campus in the first week of classes, causing the huge number of requests to join my course.

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Marketing Durkheim’s Suicide

I recently came across a copy of Durkheim’s Suicide at a used book sale and decided to buy it since it was 80 cents and I didn’t already have a copy. The version I got was published by the Free Press. The front cover looks like this:

The front cover, though, is not the reason for this post. It was the back cover that was particularly interesting. Here it is:

Despite the fact that the book’s subtitle is “A Study in Sociology” and several of the descriptions identify Durkheim as a sociologist, the upper left corner clearly classifies the book as “Psychology.” Similarly, the quotes describing the book’s importance are from Psychoanalytic Quarterly and American Journal of Psychiatry.

It would have been interesting to hear the discussion that led to such a critical work of sociology being labeled this way, but I assume that the decision came down to marketing. A lot of small bookstores might not have sociology sections, but they probably do have psychology sections, so maybe the Free Press thought that labeling it this way would allow it to appear in more stores. To the slight credit of the Free Press, the newer cover of Suicide appears to be labeled as “Social Science” but the quotes remain the same.

I guess that this isn’t quite as bad as labeling Bill O’Reilly as “Social Science” or Glenn Beck as “Non-Fiction,” but it does indicate that sociology’s quest for legitimacy continues…

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The sociology of The Hunger Games

When I initially read The Hunger Games novels by Suzanne Collins, I appreciated the third book for its depiction of the messiness of revolution. It is not surprising that this messiness allows people from a variety of political orientations to connect with the story, as Sarah Seltzer and sociologist Mari Armstrong-Hough discuss at Flavorwire:

Beyond just advocating personal resistance to forces of political control, she says the books put forth the idea that “violence breeds docility.” “I don’t mean that threatening people with violence makes them docile, because it doesn’t. I mean that teaching people to be violent and consume violence makes them docile,” she explains. “The Games institutionalize a political docility not so much because they threaten violence to the districts’ children, but because they create a society in which people think they must choose survival over solidarity. I think a lot of people, regardless of their political affiliation, feel like there has been a lot of being forced to choose survival over solidarity going around in the US.”

Via: The Society Pages

See Also: Katniss Everdeen on the Academic Job Market and The Hunger Games and Movie Relationships

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What Becker and Goffman did when they couldn’t get jobs

The history of the sociology job market contains some interesting peculiarities. For example, George Herbert Mead received an M.A. in philosophy from Harvard and then went to Germany to work on his Ph.D. Before his dissertation was completed, he accepted a faculty position at the University of Michigan where he taught philosophy and psychology before later following John Dewey to the University of Chicago. He never completed his Ph.D. (Imagine the field day that a certain job site would have with his hiring today!) It was, I suppose, a different time. (A certain job site does have a field day with discussions of full professors whom it is argued couldn’t get a tenure-track position in today’s market with their current records.) The cases of Howie Becker and Erving Goffman show that not all of the big names in sociology had such an easy time on the job market while reinforcing how different things were back then.

At ASA in San Francisco this year, Howie Becker was the discussant on one of the “Young Ethnographer” panels (the one without Alice Goffman). About the papers, he said something along the lines of “How am I supposed to talk about such different papers at the same time” and then moved on to a discussion of his belief that the best ethnographic work (he actually stated that he prefers the term “field work”) is typically conducted by young people in graduate school who have the benefit of time.* Early in his career, he and his fellow University of Chicago graduate Erving Goffman (if this had been the session with Alice Goffman he could have brought things full-circle…) were unable to find work. So they conducted research.

According to Wikipedia (which has incorrect information about Mead’s education and, thus, may or may not be a reliable source of information on the biographies of sociologists), after completing his Ph.D. Becker conducted research at the Institute for Juvenile Research, in a postdoc at the University of Illinois, and as a research associate at Stanford before starting as a faculty member at Northwestern. Although things might not have seemed too dire because he received his Ph.D. when he was only 23, it was over ten years before Becker started what today would probably be considered his official career. Goffman, meanwhile, worked as a research associate at the University of Chicago and then for the National Institute for Mental Health before beginning as a faculty member at Berkeley.

Becker’s point in discussing the job market woes that he and Goffman experienced at ASA this year was that they both relished the opportunity to focus on research during those years, even as their friends took pity on them. My point in discussing them is to highlight the evolution of job market pathways in the intervening years. While a candidate today might be able to get a postdoc, the increasing reliance on adjunct labor means that the prospects for somebody without a tenure-track job who wants to stay in academia are much more likely to include cobbling together a poverty-level salary from various adjunct positions than earning a comfortable living conducting research. The outcomes of these pathways are also clear, since adjunct teaching leaves little time for building a publication record that will result in an eventual tenure-track job.

Despite what might have been perceived by their friends as early-career stumbles, Becker and Goffman went on to have illustrious careers in sociology and made large contributions to the discipline. How many similar contributions does the current opportunity structure within academia deprive us of?

*Later in his career, he claimed that he found time for field work by being a bad departmental citizen. It is best that we don’t mention the advice that he solicited on this topic from a few esteemed audience members.

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Questioning Donald Sterling

A few days ago, L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling was revealed to have said some racist things. Although his fate as owner of an NBA team has not yet been determined, his ability to interact with those on his team and attend NBA games has been; he has been banned for life.

There are a number of interesting sociological questions related to this situation. One concerns the relationship between private statements and personal property. Another is related to types of discrimination and why statements that gain public attention can have more severe consequences than years of discriminatory practices. Although NBA players are paid very well, we can also use this situation to examine relationships between owners and players. Finally, Doug Hartmann at The Society Pages has a nice exploration of the situation’s impact on our understanding of racism in America.

Included in Hartmann’s post is a message from Max Fitzpatrick of Central New Mexico Community College (Edit: Fitzpatrick’s message is now its own post). Fitzpatrick writes:

Instead of merely being what Marx sarcastically called “critical critics”—those who attempt social redress through words alone—we should take these opportunities to bring attention to—and to change—the poor social conditions and institutional discrimination disproportionately faced by people of color. Attacking the material foundations of the problem will be more effective than simply laughing at the wrinkled old symptoms of the problem.

In some ways, the Sterling situation seems to support Fabio’s claim that, while we are not “post-racial,” we may be “post-racist.” Although racism is still prevalent, its public expression has been severely limited. As Fitzpatrick and Hartmann note, however, this may actually serve to make racism and discrimination more dangerous, since they continue to have serious negative effects even when society claims that they don’t.

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Raw numbers vs. statistics

Following the arrest of Aaron Hernandez, who played tight end for the New England Patriots, a Facebook posted the CNN screen cap above. If you ask a member of the general public how the arrest rate in the NFL compares to that of other sports, or even the country as a whole, they might guess that it is higher, not lower. This is a good example of the difference between raw numbers and statistics and is an important part of the information literacy that students should learn in research methods and statistics courses. Exploring the numbers in a bit more depth (and ignoring the fact that the type of crime, which could easily influence perceptions, is not noted), we can see where misconceptions in the general public might come from.

Major League Baseball has 30 teams and each team has 25 players on its active roster, with up to 40 players signed at any given time. Assuming that these statistics are per year (another good question to ask!), if 2.1% of MLB players are arrested that means that 15.75 (for a 25-player roster) or 25.2 (for a 40-player roster) players would be arrested each year out of 750 or 1200 total players, respectively.

The National Basketball Association has 30 teams and each team has 15 players. If 5.1% of NBA players are arrested in a given year, that results in 22.95 players arrested out of 450 players. As you can see in the table above, this is above the national average. David Stern, the NBA’s commissioner, has famously tried to clean up the league’s image by enforcing a dress code since the beginning of the 2005-06 season.

The National Football League has 32 teams and each team has 53 players, more than twice the active roster of MLB teams and more than three times the number of players on an NBA team. If 2% of NFL players are arrested in a given year, this means that 33.92 players will be arrested out of 1696 total players. A more in-depth exploration of the rate of arrest for NFL players compared to the general population is available here.

If each arrest leads to a news story, it is easy to see how the general public could think that NFL players are getting arrested at a higher rate than their counterparts in other professional sports. Looking at statistics, however, reveals the truth that the large rosters of NFL teams that lead to more media coverage of arrests. A discussion of an easily-accessible topic like this might lead into a more detailed exploration of the selective coverage of certain types of crime by the media, leading to public perceptions about the rate of crime among various race and social class groups.

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Venkatesh responds some more

This time via the Freakonomics blog, where he says that all of this is stupid and discusses his views on ethnography, stating:

The other storyline speaks to the core of academic knowledge. When you live with people, or spend years with them, as the means of obtaining your data, what are the evidentiary standards that you should follow? “Ethnographic” work is fuzzy. I’ve never lied, made up characters, or otherwise misrepresented facts. The struggle arises in ensuring that your memory adequately recorded the events, and then validating them before you go to print. Neither are very straightforward or easy to accomplish, particularly when you study crime and marginal social groups. The University prohibits me from using real names, so third-party validation is difficult to achieve. So, in practice, I work in teams, where many people can discuss what we all saw. I’ve collaborated with students and faculty in all of my research — with gangs, sex workers, public housing residents, etc.

In general, I think there is a healthy and vigorous debate among ethnographers about how our work should be conducted. This includes how we should write for the public, and I think we could all do a better job of making our work more accessible and enjoyable to read.

I’m not sure that his view of himself as a “rogue” sociologist and statements about “fuzzy” ethnography support his claims of rigorous data collection.

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Venkatesh in the news

Columbia sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh was in the news on Friday, not for being a “rogue sociologist” as much as for potential misappropriation of funds as the head of Columbia’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy. As noted in the New York Times:

And at Columbia, where he briefly led the university’s largest social science research center, he was the subject last year of a grueling investigation into a quarter-million dollars of spending that Columbia auditors said was insufficiently documented, misappropriated or outright fabricated.

According to internal documents from that investigation, which were obtained by The New York Times, the auditors said that Professor Venkatesh directed $52,328 to someone without any “documented evidence of work performed.” He listed a dinner for 25 people, relating to research on professional baseball players; auditors found that only 8 people had attended, and that the research project had not been approved.

He charged Columbia for town cars to take him around, to take his fiancée home from work one late night, to take someone — it is not specified whom — from Professor Venkatesh’s address to a building that houses a nail salon and a psychic. All told, auditors questioned expenses amounting to $241,364.83.

More interesting to me than this is a little bit of insight into Venkatesh’s own myth-making:

He signed on for a research project led by William Julius Wilson, a pre-eminent scholar of race and poverty, for which Professor Venkatesh says he approached strangers, questionnaire in hand, and asked, “How does it feel to be black and poor?” (Possible answers: very bad, somewhat bad, neither bad nor good, somewhat good, very good.) But he quickly came to see the folly of this approach, he has said, and ditched the questionnaire in favor of just spending time with his subjects, time that rolled on into years, as he tried to learn about their lives on their terms, not his.

The story, which he has recounted in two books and numerous speaking engagements, is a good one: it allows Professor Venkatesh to laugh at himself, yet also implies that he was more authentically engaged with poor black people than his professors were. But Professor Wilson, for one, was surprised when he read it. “I asked him one day: ‘Where did you get that questionnaire? I don’t remember ever giving you any questionnaire like that!’ And he said, ‘Well, it wasn’t yours.’ ”

Professor Wilson, now at Harvard, describes his former student as brilliant, creative and “able to easily establish rapport with different people.”

“He has a very pleasant personality, and he makes people relax.”

He was also savvy in the realm of academic politics. “The other graduate students were envious that he was able to command a lot of my time,” Professor Wilson said. “I’m a very busy person.”

Professor Venkatesh later revealed how. “I found out later when he wrote the book ‘Gang Leader for a Day’ that he took up golf as a way to spend more time with me,” Professor Wilson said.

The story as a whole is somewhat strange, since it talks a lot about Venkatesh’s background in what could be a much shorter article about the potential misappropriation of funds, but it is always interesting to see a sociologist discussed by a major media outlet. Venkatesh has responded via Bwog, the online extension of Columbia’s monthly Blue and White magazine for undergraduates. In part, he states:

That said, I was not successful in implementing changes or, candidly, in paying careful attention to record keeping of my own. The audit document discussed in the Times article was the beginning of an inquiry, not the end. The administration asked me to address a range of issues, which I did honestly and forthrightly. Was I a good bookkeeper? Not by any stretch. I was overwhelmed, I was working both at Columbia and at the FBI, and I struggled to keep up. So ethically, I felt it important to return approximately $13,000 for which there was inadequate documentation. I then took a partial leave to deepen my work at the FBI.

The article also suggests that I work outside the boundaries of mainstream sociology. I plead guilty. My discipline is stuffy and losing relevance daily in the academic and public eye. But, I have never been anything other than scrupulous, honest and ethical in my research, and I have always safeguarded the risk of my research subjects at every moment. With pride, I can say that, as a filmmaker and scholar, I have been working in some of the most difficult research field sites, in our nation’s inner cities with marginal populations, for two decades.

It is nice to see that the scandal hasn’t stopped him from mythologizing himself at the expense of the discipline!

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Sociology and the “real world”

When I teach Intro I often end the semester by stating that I hope students will take something away from the course regardless of their major or future career path.  This is particularly true in the case of people who will eventually take on roles that affect the course of our country, such as those pursuing business, law, or education.  I feel better about these careers knowing that those who pursue them have had some sociological training.  In recent years, however, my sense of what I want these students to take away from sociology has been solidified as I listen to political rhetoric and talk to friends who took sociology courses (way) back in college but who have moved away from sociological ideas as a result of exposure to the “real world.”  What I want students to take away from sociology is this: You cannot draw conclusions about society based on the people that you interact with on a daily basis.

As a graduate student and an assistant professor I have heard friends, family, community members, and politicians refer to the “real world.”  When they do so, they almost universally mean the social world that they inhabit.  Their own experiences, then, are real, while those of others in different settings contain an element that they perceive to be artificial.  A businessperson may justify a decision to outsource jobs for greater profit margins by explaining that the people protesting the action do not understand the “real world” of business.  Similarly, somebody may justify a racist statement by noting that it is grounded in “real world” interaction with members of the racial group in question.  In each case, individuals privilege their own experiences over the larger body of knowledge that could be accessed through simple research about society as a whole.

Through this process, the lessons that we teach in sociology courses about race, class, or gender are likely to be overridden by individuals who interact with one or two people that confirm societal stereotypes.  Stereotypes about welfare recipients, for example, are rampant.  This morning on Facebook I read several assertions that many families have been taking advantage of welfare for generations with no acknowledgement that there have been strict work and time requirements on welfare since 1996.  A sociology student may recognize this, but a sociology graduate may not.  In my future courses I will spend a much larger amount of time emphasizing that individual experiences are not an appropriate basis for drawing conclusions about society.  If students take nothing else away from my courses I will consider myself successful.

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