interpretive & qualitative

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 –

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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 –

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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.

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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 –

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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 –

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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-

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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 –

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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-

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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 –

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In this episode we speak to Francesca Polletta. Francesca is a professor of sociology at the University of California Irvine. She is the author of It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics and Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements. Francesca has also authored many peer-review articles on social movements, democracy, and culture. Francesca joins us to discuss coding stories from online forums as a way of studying public deliberation.

“We really struggled with figuring out how to be flexible enough to capture what people what people do when they are actually telling stories, which is not to hue strictly to the formal criteria of formal storytelling. While, at the same time, not losing what makes stories interesting, which is that we know when we hear a story in conversation.”
– Francesca Polletta –

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