Alice Goffman’s ethnographic foray into a black neighborhood in inner city Philadelphia has attracted attention both inside and outside of academia. While On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City was a critical success and Goffman was initially celebrated for her accounts of over-policing and over-criminalization, questions are now being raised about the accuracy of Goffman’s accounts, her participation in illegal activities, and the claims made in the book. Today, Douglas Hartmann, Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, President of the Midwest Sociological Society, and co-editor of The Society Pages joins us to discuss lessons that can be learned from the attention the book has received as well as the larger implications for sociologists and urban ethnographers.

“What’s a good ethnography? There is not a single answer to that. The reason there is not a single answer is because there is a number of different questions and goals that ethnographers can take on…On the one hand, what are the goals and objectives that the researcher him or herself has and try to evaluate the work on those terms. And then, there is another set of terms on what else do we want to learn from that project. That is a different set of standards.”
– Douglas Hartmann –

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this episode, we talk with Daniel Winchester, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Purdue University. Dan joins us to discuss ethnographic research. In particular, Dan explains the value of ethnographic research for better understanding religious conversion and cultural practice.

“How do you get access to people’s lives, people’s experiences, people’s feelings? Of course, you can never do that completely. You don’t become a mind reader. One of the things you do get some insight into by participating in the life of community, is how participating in particular types of activities, and involving yourself in particular types of social relations, change the way people understand and experience the world. And, part of the way you understand that is by doing those things yourself.”
– Daniel Winchester –

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this episode, we are joined by Shamus Khan, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University. Professor Khan studies cultural sociology and stratification, with a strong focus on elites. He is the author of Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School and The Practice of Research. We discuss using historical data for his new research project, in which he uses the New York Philharmonic archives to uncover the character of their subscribers from the 1870s to the present.

“I love very micro-level analyses where you can see what one person is doing or what is happening on the ground…It is super exciting to see where did the Vanderbilts sit, who was sitting around them, and what kind of things they were listening to…The main advantage of this methodological approach to me, is that I find it really exciting. It is not hard for me to get up and go to my office everyday to do something like this because, as time consuming as it is, I get to really know something that happened, and I am able to document it and provide a really clear account of what was going on in what is often a cloudy past.”
– Shamus Khan –

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

On this episode of the Give Methods a Chance podcast , we are joined by Dr. Andrew Billings. Andrew is the Ronald Reagan Endowed Chair in Broadcasting in the College of Communication and Information Sciences at The University of Alabama. He has authored books on a range of topics including Fantasy Sport and coverage of the Olympic games.  His scholarship has also attracted interest outside academic walls from mainstream outlets ranging from the The Boston Globe to the Los Angeles Times to ESPN.com. We talk to Andrew about his use of quantitative content analysis to study traditional and social media coverage of NBA player Jason Collins’ coming out as gay.

“One barrier, and this is certainly true with more and more social media, is that there is an incredible amount of, it is not really negativity, of course there is negativity out there…Coding for sarcasm can be really tricky. And that is the reason we can’t use, with most of the work I do, I can’t send it through a content analysis software program because inevitably it is going to code things differently than the way they come out.”
– Andrew Billings – 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Helen B. Marrow is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Tufts University, with affiliations in American Studies, Latino Studies, Latin American Studies and the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. Helen’s research interests include immigration, race and ethnicity, social class, health,and inequality and social policy. She is the author of New Destination Dreaming: Immigration, Race, and Legal Status in the Rural American South and has published in journals including the American Sociological Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Perspectives on Politics. Today we discuss her tripartite methodological design for studying immigrant/native relations as well as her experience conducting collaborative, interdisciplinary research. For more information, visit the project website.

“One of the things we have learned, and we have incorporated into our survey and interview data, is that a lot of the fierce debates about whether more contact between groups reduces prejudice and produces positive outcomes or whether it leads to greater feelings of threat and more negative outcomes, has to do with the fact that the different disciplines are operationalizing and measuring contact differently. Psychologists think about contact as direct, face-to-face contact. But often in sociology and political science, we are thinking about contact at a broader and more macro level.”
– Helen B. Marrow –

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this episode, guest host Sarah Shannon interviews Daniel Sui, Chair of the Department of Geography and Distinguished Professor of Social and Behavioral Science at The Ohio State University. Daniel has published extensively on the use of volunteered geographic information as well as the use of social media as a new data source for geographic and social science research. He joins us to share his thoughts on big data, the methodological challenges, and the methodological advantages.

“In terms of the applications of big data, it is limited by only your imagination. That is why big data has attracted interest by industry, government agencies all over the world, and, of course, academics and scholarly researchers.”
–Daniel Sui-

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this episode, we talk with Dale C. Spencer, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Manitoba. Dale joins us to discuss ethnographic research. In particular, Dale explains the value of observant participation in understanding the sensory and phenomenological experiences of becoming a mixed martial artist.

“When you are an observant participant, you are at stake. You have a vested interest in succeeding. But the reality of the matter is, you are also open, very clearly, to fail in that world.”
–Dale C. Spencer-

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this episode we are joined by Matthew Hughey. Matthew is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of number books including the White Savior Film: Content, Critics and Consumption, The Wrongs of the Right: Language, Race, and the Republican Party in the Age of Obama, and White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race. Matt joins us to discuss his multi-methods approach to studying film, film criticism, and film consumption.

“I’m a methodologically promiscuous sociologist, so I dabble with different methodologies depending what types of questions I ask.  So for example, If I wanted to know something about the ways that audience members develop, nurture, and deconstruct—in their everyday lived experiences—a film genre such as this, it would call for a kind of ethnographic strategy in which I would need to embed myself with a community of avid film goers.  That type of immersion would be necessary to gain a sociologically informed view of what really figure out the relationship between people lived experiences and their cinematic evaluations.  But since I was interested in a different question—notably, what kinds of demographic and interactive setting influenced how audiences make meaning of just a handful of these films, then interviews and comparisons between focus groups fit the bill for my question.”
– Matthew W. Hughey –

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this episode, we talk with Amy Schalet, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. We use her work on teenage sexuality to discuss in-depth interviews and cross-cultural research.

“You take them back to their comfort zone. Or you say, ‘why did that feel so wrong’? You have to stay with them. You have to make them feel that even though they just had an explosion, emotionally, that you are with them and willing to listen to that.”
–Amy Schalet-

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In this episode, we talk to Audrey Kobayashi about focus groups.  We draw upon her work on transnationalism, citizenship and social cohesion to discuss the power of the underutilized method, distinguish between group interviews and focus groups, and share practical tricks of the trade.

“The focus group is not a place to get a collection of information about individuals. It is about the dynamic, the process, the conversation. It is never about what any one person says.”
– Audrey Kobayashi –

Podcast: Play in new window | Download