qualitative

In this episode, we talk to Melissa J. Wilde, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Melissa joins us to discuss her use of comparative historical methods in researching and writing her forthcoming book Birth of the Culture Wars.  During our conversation, Melissa reflects on questions of generalizability, the authors responsibility for how and who uses the published research, and how the methodological approach can unsettle many of our preconceived notions of modern culture including religious divides around race, gender, and fertility.

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Jill Weinberg is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Tufts University and an affiliated scholar at the American Bar Foundation.  In this episode, we discuss her research on how ordinary people define justice and injustice and how social context informs their definitions. In particular, we focus on Jill’s use of post-it notes to gather responses and how this methodological choice mitigates the researcher’s impact in the field and empowers respondents as they engage with what many view as a highly emotional topic.

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In this episode we welcome Madison Van Oort, Ph.D candidate at the University of Minnesota. Madison conducts research in the areas of fast-fashion and low-wage labor in the 21st century. The format of the conversation will be slightly different than past episodes, as Madison joins us to reflect on the strengths and limitations of the discourse and semiotic analysis that she employed in collaboration with me (Kyle Green), to study how companies employed the crisis of masculinity to sell products. Our co-authored article, “We Wear No Pants: Selling the Crisis of Masculinity in the 2010 Super Bowl Commercials” can be found in Signs (Spring 2013 Vol. 38, No. 3). I enjoyed the chance to participate with in some of the methodological reflections and hope you enjoy the conversation as much we did.

“Semiotic analysis is never objective and it is never absolute. I don’t think that we were ever claiming that we were taking an objective approach. Instead, I think we just kind of came at it as two sociologists with somewhat similar, but also somewhat different, academic training and with eyes toward different kinds of signs and symbols.”
–Madison Van Oort- 

*The commercials that we discussed on this podcast can be found here.

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In this episode we are joined by R. Tyson Smith, Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Haverford College. Tyson conducts research in the areas of health, gender, social psychology, criminal justice, and the military. He joins us to discuss the ethnographic approach he employs in his book, Fighting for Recognition: Identity, Masculinity, and the Act of Violence in Professional Wrestling.

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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 – 

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In this episode, C.J. Pascoe, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon, joins us to discuss the ethnographic research she conducted for her award-winning book, Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School. We discuss the joys of being an ethnographer, the difficulties of accessing youth culture, and how entering the school allowed C.J. a more nuanced understanding of contemporary masculinity.

“What was really interesting was that when I started watching young people and their gendered practices and enactment and also then listening to what they were saying in their reflections about gendered meaning and practices, I didn’t always see and hear things that were congruent with one another. I’d see these young men homophobically harass one each other—call each other ‘fag’, call each other ‘gay’. Then when I did an interview with some man who had engaged in some of that harassment and I asked him about homophobia, he would be like, ‘oh no, gay guys should totally be able to get married’.” 

– C.J. Pascoe – 

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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 – 

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In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Clifton Evers. Clifton is a member of the Media, Culture, Heritage unit at Newcastle University. He joins us to discuss mobile video ethnography and his use of GoPro cameras to better capture and understand affects, emotion, and masculinity through the study of surfing. Clifton’s chapter on this topic can be found in the recently published edited volume Researching Embodied Sport: Exploring Movement Cultures. 

I started carrying a very old Handycam everywhere and shooting footage. I eventually got frustrated because I was stuck on land. And, what a lot of the men would speak about or what they would experience in terms of emotions, affects, and embodied experience was happening in the water. So how does one do video research in the sea?

– Clifton Evers –

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In this episode, we talk with Stefano Bloch. Stefano is an urban geographer specializing in social and spatial theory, cultural criminology, and subcultures. He is currently a Presidential Diversity Fellow in Urban Studies at Brown University. Stefano joins us to reflect on his use of personal autobiography as a source of data and methodological asset. In particular, he turns to his own experience as a member of the graffiti subculture when researching the destruction of the LA Olympic freeway murals by writers over the last 30 years. Stefano’s article on the subject titled “Why Grafitti Writers Write on Murals” is forthcoming in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 

“So often I hear students say the same few things. One of which is, “well, I’m from such a boring area and nothing happened there—we were so monotonous in the way we lived our lives, I didn’t do anything”. And, I remind them, if what they mean by boring is the traditional suburban, homogeneous enclave in the middle of Connecticut, that is, in fact, a revolution in the way in which people have lived. You know, the family with two-parents, two-point-seven kids, the dog, and the attached garage is a rich source of data…You need to de-familiarize your own upbringing. There is no such thing as boring.”
– Stefano Bloch – 

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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 – 

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