What is interpretive sociology? Define interpretive sociology and provide a detailed explanation for your definition. Offer some examples of either foreground or background interpretivism, either from our readings or from another work in sociology with which you are familiar
Constructed from theories about social interactions that become symbolically meaningful for human actors.
Not merely interested in describing the social phenomenon (what) but also in understanding the motivation, experiences, and social framework individuals attached to their actions.
Foreground examples:
- Jalili
- Jelly’s Place
- Stuart’s social media
What is historical sociological inquiry? You may draw from Alford, Abbott, our discussions, and any other relevant in- or outside-class readings. Give at least one rich example that supports your explanation of what historical sociological inquiry is.
- Hisotrical apporach: analyzes specific processes that explain a series of contingent events
- explains social phenomena and events by tracing how they develop and evolve over time
- Example: Bowen’s study on how racism is a structural root cause of food insecurity
- It is historical because it historicizes food insecurity by tracing it to the the historical systematic racial oppressions
- examines historical events and processes including slavery, the exploitation of black slavery in the agricultural South and the Jim Crow segregation and anlyze how these historical forces evolve to the food insecurity today
Discuss the main differences between the ‘multivariate’ and the ‘formal’ methods of inquiry. Pick any two readings and use them to illustrate your arguments.
Multivariate: focuses on specific sets of variables and their relationship
- Ferguson:
Formal: not focusing on the specific content of variables and relationships; identify structural properties and social mechanisms
- The Triad
First, describe Georg Simmel’s basic argument in his discussion of ‘The Triad’. Second, provide an example of a triadic social process, drawn from your own observation or your reading. Third, discuss Simmel’s argument in relation to the tradition of formal analysis in sociology, a tradition that he may be said to have founded.
- Main argument: how the addition of a third member can change the group dynamic of the original dyad.
- Examples:
- Mediator:
Children – enhance the relationship of the dyad
Marriage consult – act as a neutral party and have the opposing parties hear each other out
- Rule and Divide:
Old kings who would intentionally divide the estates of two nobles to separate their power and
- The third who benefits from the dyad
Consumers who benefit from two competing companies - Formal: do not focus on the content; focus on the social patterns, mechanisms, and structure
What is the role of meaning – and interpretation of meaning – in Arlie Hochschild’s approach to contemporary American service work, Forest Stuart’s approach to urban gang violence, or Jaleh Jalili’s approach to spatial, social, and symbolic boundaries? Please be as specific as possible.
Stuart’s Study uncovers the social meaning of social media among gangs. youths.
- Role of meaning: For gang youths is to signal toughness and loyalty.
- Identified three strategies for them to do so: cross-referencing (抓造假）, calling bluffs (虚张声势), catching and lacking (线下堵人)
- The interpretation of violence is very important
- For outsiders, the tweets may appear as incitements to violence
- For insiders, they are often over-exaggerated and therefore benign in reality
- Lead to unfair criminal justice practices
What is a heuristic? Provide a definition and explain why heuristics are important to the research process.
- Heuristic:
thinking steps or tools that help researchers generate new ideas - Narrative
- stopping and putting in motion
- latent functions
- counterfactuals - Search
- analogy
- borrowing methods - Descriptive
- changing levels and contexts
- setting conditions - Argument
- Problematizing the obvious
- Making a reversal
- Simplified assumption
How do ethnographers conduct their craft? What are the distinctive features of their approach to social life? Discuss, drawing from Elijah Anderson’s “Jelly’s Place: An Ethnographic Memoir” or Diane Vaughn’s “Theorizing Disaster”, as well as any other ethnographic sociology that you have read or done.
- Ethnographers: gather data by interacting with people
- Distinctive features:
- immersive and long-term engagement
- Proximity and empathy
- Reflexivity
**Why does Abbott say that SCA (standard causal analysis) has “no causal foundation at all”? This seems odd, given that establishing causation is given such pride of place in this perspective and in social science generally. Relatedly, what does Alford mean (pp. 33-34) when he writes that “regardless of the paradigm being used, causation cannot be inferred directly from the evidence”? Please comment on this thorny issue.
- In many standard causal analyses, there is a correlation between events or variables, but they are not necessarily causal relationships.
- Correlation doesn’t mean causation
- Three criteria of causation:
- Independent precedes dependent
- No other factors can explain the relationship
- Empirical evidence
- Evidence alone cannot prove causation; scientists must use reasoning to interpret the reasoning
Abbott claims that each of these methodological traditions can play a kind of competitive “scissors/paper/rock” game with one another. Does that mean that they are all losers? Does it make sense to consider one ‘better’ than the other? Explain and comment.
- To think that all losers: no single paradigm can capture the complexity of social life; each has distinct weaknesses
- Multivariate beat interpretive by generalizing
- Historical beat multivariate by historicizing categories
- Interpretive beat historical by capturing the variety of the social world
Why does Alford think that multiple paradigms have more theoretical power? Is it simply a case of the more the merrier or…? Illustrate your answer with examples. What are some of the limits to combining paradigms of inquiry? How much of a problem are these limits?
- Multiple paradigms have more theoretical power because they capture different dimensions of social phenomena; shed new light on the same problem
-No single paradigm could capture the full complexity of social life - However, not the more the better. Alford “research questions come before research methods.”
- E.g. In The Triad, Simmel only focused on formality in the foreground, as his main interest is to explore the social properties. Putting interpretive in the foreground would distract from Simmel’s main question about the form of association itself.
- Limits to combining paradigms of inquiry
- Increased cost and time
- Need for specialized knowledge across multiple methodologies
- Increased cost and time
- Important to consider but not fatal
- Need for specialized knowledge ⇒ can collaborate
Choose an article and list as many heuristics as you can find therein. (Feel free to come up with more heuristics that you think should have been used.) Explain and illustrate your answer.
Article: Vaughan’s NASA article
1. Search heuristic
- Analogy: compares NASA’s organizational structure to bureaucratic structure and to earlier institutional deviance
- Borrowing method: combines ethnography and historical reconstruction and calls it historical ethnography
2. Argument heuristic
- Problemize the obvious: everyone thought that the Challenger accident was due to poor judgment and management failure, but Vaughan questioned this assumption;
- Descriptive heuristic
- Changing levels and contexts: her analysis moved from micro, meso, to macro level (individual managers and engineers, NASA organization, national institutions) - Narrative
- Stop and freeze: freezes the accident as a moment of analyzing and reconstructing the sequence of events, processes, and decisions that lead to that.
- Latent function: another feature/function of 1) bureaucratic layers (which is supposed to lead to concise convey of information) actually lead to the immittance of risk information and discourage dissent 2) the pressure of costs and schedules, although led to efficiency, also led risk acceptability
Taking Thomas Schelling’s simulations as the point of departure, describe the social process that generates segregation. Does Schelling offer a convincing explanation of the segregation we observe in the real world? Why or why not, in your view? (Hint: see Abbott, pp. 187-191) Compare Schelling’s approach to studying segregation, and his explanation of the causes, to Massey and Denton’s (see Alford, Chapter 4).
- Individual decisions are independent of each other,
- their weak preferences generate highly segregated results.
- Autonomous and no central authority
- Specifically, individuals want moderate preferences (⅓ of the neighbours like themselves);
- I don’t think Schelling’s model alone offers a convincing explanation of the segregation we observe in the real world because, as Alford mentioned, it simplifies social dynamics in real life, which also include other economic, institutional, and historical factors.
- Massey and Denton argued that segregation is developed by income, racial discrimination, and restrictive
- Schelling: unintended; Massey and Denton’s: deliberate result and intended exclusion
- Schelling: multivariate; Massey and Denton’s: formal
“One of the most useful narrative heuristics is ‘what if?’” (Abbott, chapter 5) Why? Discuss an example of counterfactual reasoning in a piece of sociological work that you have read.
- Counterfactual: how would the result change if certain conditions or events were changed?
- Generate new theories and research questions
- Identify truly necessary factors vs. contingent factors
Alford writes that the methodological approaches that he is analyzing mediate between theory and evidence. What do you think he means? Taking off from the articles by Jalili (2020) and Ferguson (2020), please explain what it means to “mediate between theory and evidence, ” being sure to define “theory” and “evidence” along the way.
- Theory: postulation that explain certain phenomenon
- Evidence: observed facts or data that support a certain theory
- He means that the methodologies bridge the theory and evidence.
- Takes something abstract (theory) into specific plans that allows for concrete evidence
- Jalili: theory
Drawing on any one of the pieces we have read, or examples from our guest lecturers, give an example of a strong “why question” that emerged from and/or guided the author’s research. Or, if such a question is lacking, what should the “why” question have been?
- Ferguson: Why do some religious congregations have more gender-egalitarian practices than others?
- NASA: Why did a well-organized organization like NASA make a decision that led to a disaster?
The Ferguson (2020) article examined the relationship between organizational resources and the gender gap in lay leadership in congregations. Please summarize his research question and main results, and discuss how the results were similar to the previous research he reviewed and how they differed. Were the results surprising? Finally, sketch out the strengths and weaknesses of the ‘multivariate’ approach and discuss how you find these strengths and weaknesses reflected in his article.
- Finding: religious congregations with more resources (bigger size, higher income and education level) are more likely to adopt gender-egalitarian approaches
- Why?
- competing for contingency
- Influence of higher educated and wealthy members (they are more likely to have gender-egalitarian view)
- Similiarities
- Persistence of gender gap in leadership positions in religious organizations due to cultural association between religious authorities and masculinity
- Differences
- Different from the glass cliff phenomenon, where women clergies are more likely to lead in resource-poor organizations, where leadership is considered prestigious, the study provides evidence that the opposite is true for women lay leaders
- Strengths: Allows for generalization; uses a large, nationally representative sample
- Weakness:
- No historicizing of gender; although provided some historical contexts of gender,
- the article treats gender as static variables and does not account for how they change and evolve over time
Rauch (2002) says that agent-based models can be used to peer into “black boxes.” What is meant by this phrase, in your view? What are some of the benefits and drawbacks of agent-based modeling? Can this particular formal approach be used in conjunction with other modes of inquiry? Please discuss.
What is a confounding variable and how does it differ from an intervening variable? Provide brief definitions, then choose any of our readings and discuss how they have addressed confounding variable(s) in the study and whether there are other confounders that you think should have been accounted for.
- Confounding variable: distort the relationship between x and y
- Intervening: explains the relationship between x and y
- Ferguson’s confounding variable:
Tenure
Attendance rate
What are the three criteria for establishing a causal relationship? Provide an example of a causal relationship and evaluate how each criterion is fulfilled.
Three criterias:
1. Independent variable precedes dependent variable
2. Empirical evidence showing the relationship
3. No other factors
Example: drinking coffee
Empirical: reported an increased energy level and decreased fatigue
What does it mean for a method to be in the foreground vs. background? Drawing on any one of the pieces we read by our guest lecturers or the Schelling chapter, what methods were in the foreground and background of the study? How could the study incorporate another foreground or background approach? Would doing so strengthen or limit the study? Describe and explain?
Foreground:
Core argument
Main logic framework
Primary mode of inquiry
Background
Support and add depth
Provide context
Do not drive main analysis
Vaughan’s study
- Foreground: interpretive - seeks to uncover the social interaction and organizational culture that made the NASA challenge disaster possible
Understand how the employers at NASA construct and attach meaning to concepts such as “risk” and “safety”
- Background: historical; trying to understand the process and events that unfold to lead to the event
- Could add: multivariate:
Production pressure
Number of incidents where the decision was made to still proceed despite finding an anomaly
- not necessrily strengthen the study, as Vaughan’s focusis to understand how organizational culture normalized deviance – best captured through historical and interpetive approaches
- would risk over simplying the complex social dynamic into statistical relationship
Briefly define and explain what we mean by “event”, “process”, and “narrative” in historical sociology. Explain what distinguishes historical sociology from multivariate and interpretive approaches.
- Event: specific occurrence situated in a distinct time and place
- Process: a sequence of events connected over time
- Narrative: story or interpretation used by sociologists used to describe how events and processes unfold; can subjected to perspectives
Historical vs. multivariate:
Multivariate: treat variables as static, do not care about the process and how they evolve over time; focus on present
Historical vs. interpretive”
Interpretive: social meaning
Not interested in finding the social meaning but how they unfold
Historical sociology relies on diverse forms of evidence to make claims. Give an example of three kinds of sources an historical sociologist might draw on in their work, describe how you might find these sources, and explain the strengths and limitations to consider when working with these sources.
- official archives
- Ex. Census archives, Official documents reports: NASA official publicized reports
- Where to find it?
Government records posted on website
Publicized reports
Academic databases
- Strengths
Authoritative and credible
Organized and systematic
- Weaknesses
Lack detail
Omit marginalized voice - Media archives
Ex. Newspaper, press releases
Where to find it?
Websites
Strengths
- Captures public discourse and debates
Weaknesses
- May reflect bias and not as credible - Personal archives
Ex. Diaries, interviews, oral history
Where to find?
Digital archive organizations
Special collection library or museum
Strength:
Detailed & descriptive
Weakness:
Not necessarily factual or credible
Subject to subjectivity (how interviewee ask and construct the interview questions)
Compare and contrast how an ethnographic and a multivariate approach might study the same question. Provide a clear definition of both approaches, and provide two reasons why a researcher might choose one of the approaches or the other.
Example: Language brokering (the process of translating for their non english speaking parents) in immigrant children
Explain how research using an interpretive approach becomes convincing. Propose three ways that you would evaluate an interpretive study.
- Convincing when researchers:
- Accurately and comprehensively captured the insiders’ perspectives
- Interpreted the meanings in ways that are both socially insightful and accurate - Three ways
- Reflexivity
- Transparency
- Length
- Proximity
