Transparency Social Science Research, a New Thing?
The Street Corner Society – an Early Example of a Transparency Strategy
Transparency
in science is sold as a promising strategy to increase the social
robustness of scientific knowledge. It is an attempt of getting
science out of the ivory tower, making it criticizable and thereby
increase the quality of knowledge production.
The
social sciences are sometimes accused of not complying to the new
ideal of transparent research or not taking enough effort to get more
transparent. A big problem here is that some research data, namely
qualitative data, can not be made (reasonably) accessible as easily
as numeric data. Of course, a transcript of an interview could be
uploaded to some database, but I want to argue here, that
accessibility is more than making something available. Also ways of
dealing with the data and the context of its origin need to be
explicated and described in order to enable others to work with the
data. This is what makes it more complicated to make qualitative
research transparent.
However,
in the following I want to outline an interesting piece of early
ethnographic work, interesting also in terms of transparency. And I
do think, that we could learn a lot from this example about how
qualitative research can be made transparent.
The Street Corner Society
We
talked about transparent research in the social sciences in our open
science course and when it came to thinking about examples one of my
first associations was the famous study and book “The Street Corner
Society” by William Foote Whyte which was published in 1943. It
came to my mind, because apart from the interesting results some
people also know it for the extensive appendix in the book, where
Whyte makes detailed comments on his empirical work, from how he
planed the study to how he got access to the field and his strategies
of storing and cataloging the big amount of data he produced. At this
point I want to emphasize that all of this information is crucial for
understanding and assessing the knowledge Whyte produced in his
research.
On
the one hand this appendix is a valuable resource for methodology,
since it was probably the first text on practical issues in
qualitative ethnographic research, and people would read it even 70
years later to learn about qualitative methods (at least I did). On
the other hand, intended or not, Whyte made many details of his
research transparent, what makes his findings more socially robust
and accountable.
At
the time “The Street Corner Society” was published it was
everything but common to make such explicit deliberations about the
empirical part of research and it still is in contemporary social
science research. I honestly can't tell if readers of the book
interpreted the appendix as something that increases the quality of
the research and its results, but they most certainly would if the
study would be published and read in 2016. For this reason I am of
the opinion that Whyte's 'transparency strategy” is an
extraordinary example of making research transparent.
What we could learn William F. Whyte
Even
if I argued that Whyte made his research very transparent it is still
interesting to ask how he could have been even more
transparent? What Whyte did not share was actual data, so I could say
this is something he could have done additionally. But there are
practical problems to it. First, in 1943 the massive amount of data
that is produced in an extensive ethnographic study could not be
stored on an online server where everyone can get access, but would
fill whole shelves, which makes the sharing much more complicated. Second,
the field notes as well as probably most of the data was handwritten.
Typing them either on a typewriter or a computer would take a
unreasonable amount of time. While information technology made the
storing of big amounts of data much easier, many researchers doing
ethnographic studies still face a similar problem of needing to digitalize
data which was originally handwritten.
Even
though Whyte didn't make his field notes transparent, actually he
couldn't because it just wasn't possible in the way we nowadays
understand making something accessible, but he did an excellent job
in describing and explicating the research process and the
methodological considerations. This made the research and its
findings comprehensible and open to scrutiny. And I believe this is
what transparency in science should be about, rather than dumping
'raw' data at some database.
A
timely solution of dealing with the question of how scientific
research can be made transparent in an comprehensive way would be a
combination of making available all (or all that is reasonably possible)
the produced data and explicating all the important considerations
and procedures of the research. If scientific knowledge production
should be transparent, than people should not just get access to the
produced data, but should be able to understand how the knowledge was
produced. This is what would make the knowledge really socially
robust.
Very interesting point Bernhard. I have not read Whyte´s book, but I guess it is a remarkable fundamental guide for research in Social Sciences. In addition to your concepts of Transparency, Availability and Accesibility I would like to add the notion of Reproducibility. In my opinion, Reproducibility also helps to validate the data available and no only reinforces transparency and values of sharing data, but also helps to confirm accuracy in the research.
ReplyDeleteYou are right Lucía, considering reproducibility in the assessment of the rubustness of scienctific results is indeed an important thing to do.
DeleteThe problem about reproducability is that in social scientific research, where the historical moment as well as the place where the research was conducted are very relevant, reproducibility can not possibly be achieved. This is also the case in my example of Whyte's 'Streetcorner society', where an Italian 'subcultural' community in Chicago was observed in the 1930s.
However, even if the results can not be reproduced, a research design oriented at Whyte's study could point out what differences there are between the community he observed and a community at a different place and time. This would not make Whyte's original findings more robust, but anyway, it could lead to interesting results.
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