Jay Borchert is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology and a Population Studies Center Trainee at the University of Michigan, as well as a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law & Society at UC Berkeley School of Law. We discuss research he conducted for his dissertation titled “Mass Incarceration, The Profession of Corrections, and the Way Prison Workers Construct Meanings about their Participation in our Punishment State,” where he conducted ethnographic observation of prisons and semi-structured interviews with correctional officers.

“Dramatic things happened all the time in the prisons. It’s important to be able to manage your emotions and your reactions in those situations. Many prisons have been built in areas of extreme poverty and isolation, particularly in the case of Kentucky. The characteristics of local political economies make going to work in prisons – which is a stable job, with benefits – a logical, if not pleasant, choice for a lot of people. Their choices are understandable. Going in with a judgmental attitude just makes no sense if we claim to know anything about our history and our politics – particularly our racial politics. It makes no sense to do that if we really want to work toward solving social problems.”
 – Jay Borchert – 

In this episode, we talk with Alejandro Baer, Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota.

In this study, Alejandro and his colleagues sought to understand the specific discourse around anti-semitic sentiments amongst different cultural groups in Spain. To study this difficult to measure construct, the researchers created homogenous discussion groups of 7 to 9 people, led by a trained moderator. Participants were of similar demographics, leading to a ‘group discourse mode’ that revealed the structures of meaning different groups use to discuss their views on minority groups.

“When you design your groups, they have to be internally homogenous and externally heterogeneous. All of the individuals of one group share certain similarities in terms of age, political orientation, or of religious origin. You cannot put together left wing activists with conservative religious individuals of a totally different age. That’s not the idea. We want to capture the discourse they will share, not what makes them different.
– Alejandro Baer – 

In this episode, we talk with Christopher Wildeman , Associate Professor of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University. His research and teaching interests revolve around the consequences of mass imprisonment for inequality, with emphasis on families, health, and children. He is also interested in child welfare, especially as relates to child maltreatment and the foster care system.

We talk about his article on child maltreatment, published in Pediatrics, and discuss how his research team used existing datasets in new ways to reveal better estimates of child maltreatment rates.

“Most of the statistics that we have are based on either annual rates or daily rates of experiencing some specific event. And so the technique that I use, which is called synthetic cohort life tables, is basically just a way to say: based on one year’s data, what proportion of folks could expect to experience an event at some point in their life?”
– Chris Wildeman –

In this episode, we talk with Vincent Roscigno, sociologist at The Ohio State University, about using multiple methods to research historical inequality. Using the case of the Sioux Massacre at Wounded Knee, he ultimately answers empirical and theoretical questions about how powerful state actors justify inequality. Using archives, correspondence, and qualitative and quantitative analyses, Vinnie and his research team found that officials of the Office of Indian Affairs and federal politicians amplified ethnocentric and threat frames, using the Sioux Ghost Dance as central to this argument. Force against the Sioux was consequently portrayed as justifiable, which increased the likelihood of the massacre. This unique project sheds light on the value in using multiple approaches to answer a sociological question.

“I engage in quantitative work. I engage in qualitative work. But, increasingly my work has taken on a multimethod flavor. I feel more confident when I can pull off this blending of methods… I think in some ways, questions of validity are what pushed me to become more of a multimethod researcher. I think that various types of qualitative approaches [to supplement quantitative analyses] can both give us confidence in the validity of the variables we tend to choose, as well as bolster our confidence in the interpretation of what that relationship is… For me, this type of sociology is poignant. It’s powerful. It puts a human face on some of the processes we talk about in the abstract.
– Vincent Roscigno – 

In this episode, we talk with Justin Picket of SUNY-Albany about using web-based surveys for public opinion polling and experiments. He provides guidance, tips, and tricks for using services like Amazon Mechanical Turk.

“A lot of people have great ideas, and they just don’t have the resources to go out and go a longitudinal study. Giving people the tools to initially test their idea and get it out there can really benefit science….it opens the theorizing and the research to broader set.”
– Justin Pickett – 

 

In this episode we discuss an innovative methodological approach to understanding reflexivity and identity when doing ethnographic fieldwork. We talk with Elizabeth Cherry, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Manhattanville College, who collaborated with fellow ethnographers Michaela DeSoucey, Assistant Professor of Sociology at North Carolina State University and Colter Ellis, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Montana State University.

We discuss their article, “Food for Thought, Thought for Food: Consumption, Identity and Ethnography,” published in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (JCE). This article brings together their field experiences studying animal rights, local food production, and cattle ranching and examines how those experiences re-shaped their own food consumption practices.

For anyone who is interested in being able to defend their claims and say that the research that they gathered was at the very least valid and that they know they were getting answers to the questions they asked, this is a good way to gauge the extent to which you as an individual may have affected the data collection process…. It’s interesting to see the ways in which our identities might shape what we find. It’s a good added methodological tool.
– Liz Cherry – 

Bonus podcasts! Check out Colter Ellis on TSP’s Office Hours Podcast to learn more about his work on beef production and labor and Michaela DeSoucey on TSP’s Office Hours Podcast to learn more about her work on food and cultural authenticity.

In this special edition of Give Methods a Chance, we talk with Chris Uggen to get context and insight to a recent retraction of a political science article in Science and the resulting public discourse around the study under question.

“Outright fraud, where people make up data, is likely to be exceedingly rare–in part because it is not sustainable over a long term. As academics, we rely on our professional reputation. So you might be able to get a paper published, which might even get you a job, but, long term, it just isn’t in anyone’s interest to falsify data.”
– Chris Uggen – 

In this episode, we talk with Devah Pager, Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Dr. Pager studies institutions affecting racial stratification, including education, labor markets, and the criminal justice system.  Pager’s recent research has involved a series of field experiments studying discrimination against minorities and ex-offenders in the low-wage labor market. Her book, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (University of Chicago, 2007), investigates the racial and economic consequences of large scale imprisonment for contemporary U.S. labor markets. You can read the study we discuss here.

“It’s a nice blend between experimental methods that are heavily controlled and that isolate a causal mechanism, but it’s an experiment that’s taking place in real world settings. The devil is in the details. Keep in mind that it sounds like a very simple approach, but there are a lot of complexities to carry it out effectively.”
– Devah Pager –

Keith N. Hampton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, School of Communication and Information, and an affiliate member of the Graduate Faculty in Sociology at Rutgers University. His research interests focus on the relationship between new information and communication technologies, social networks, democratic engagement, and the urban environment. Today we discuss his project, “Social Interaction in Public Spaces: A Longitudinal Study.” The goal of this study is to understand change in the social life of urban public spaces over the past 30 years, using visual content analysis.

“This is truly the only way to do a longitudinal study of public space. We can hang out in a public space for months, or maybe even a year, but doing that for two or three decades is simply impossible. So, for any large scale, longitudinal study of urban public spaces, I think this is probably the only method that is available to us.”
– Keith Hampton – 

In this episode, we talk with Naomi Sugie on using smartphones to collect data from research participants. Naomi is an Assistant Professor of Law, Criminology & Society at the University of California-Irvine. She shares findings from a study of recently released prisoners as they seek for work in Newark, New Jersey.

“Smartphones are exciting data collection tools. They can collect real time data on peoples’ experiences while they are going about their every day lives. Smartphones have their limitations, but they open up a whole new area of research and the ability to just document peoples experiences. They can expand the realm of empirical investigation for researchers to consider questions and ideas we just weren’t able to think about before, using other methods.”
– Naomi Sugie-