In Kristin Luker’s Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences: Research in An Age of Info-Glut, the author invites us to reconsider how we conceptualize research methods and theories using the metaphor of salsa dancing. She invites the reader to ponder how salsa dancing as a practice that reduces the prevalence of our Internal Censor and encourages the “making of connections across boundaries and even across disciplines” (2). Ultimately, she desires to convince the reader of conducting “research that draws on the kinds of bold and interdisciplinary insights you can get when you salsa-dance” (2). In Chapter 1, she outlines three different enterprises she plans to undertake in order to concretize this desire, which are confronting the different contexts that resulted in commonly held notions of what research methods are, establishing foundational guidelines for how to go about doing “rigorous, compelling, and intellectually honest research,” (3) and offering advice on seeing a research project through all its phases. She foregrounds three important factors, the impact of Foucault’s theorizations, an age of information saturation, and the decline of linearity, as reasons why historical traditions of teaching research skills have been undermined, resulting in the alteration of the social location of research. One thing I really appreciated about Luker’s writing was the way it was simultaneously able to achieve a conversational yet didactic tone, which is achieved by the clear definition of terms and processes in conjunction with examples and personal anecdotes from her own experience as a researcher. Even if she did refer to me as a “precocious undergraduate,” (16) I found her explanation of the salsa dancing metaphor to be compelling and persuasive.
In Chapter 8 of Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences, Luker dives into definitions and examples of participant observation (ethnography), interviews, focus groups and content analysis as different methods of conducting research. She dedicates a majority of the chapter to ethnography and interviews, detailing specific steps she suggests readers take in order to collect and analyze data in a way that is not only effective but is also rooted in theory and the question(s) that researchers are concerned with. I appreciated how Luker explained the point/purpose of conducting each particular method. For example, she writes that “the point of doing observational methods is to document ‘practices,’ those moments when belief and action come together” (158). I also found it persuasive that she paired each methodological approach with an example, whether it be a study, article, etc. of a researcher who had implemented it.
In Pierre Bourdieu’s Understanding, the author is primarily preoccupied with the nature of the research interview relationship and its propensity to be distorted. He identifies the nature of an interview as a specific “social relation” (18) that is unique in its “objective of pure knowledge” (18). He elaborates and mediates on the “various kinds of distortion[s] that are embedded in the very structure of the relationship,” identifying scientific questioning as a method of mastering and understanding these distortions. He outlines the different things that should be considered when evaluating an interview relationship, like how to “reduce as much as possible the symbolic violence…exerted through [interviews],” (19) the social asymmetry that exists when the interviewer and interviewee occupy different places in “the social hierarchy of different types of capital,” (19) seeing how an interview relationship can be a spiritual exercise, “aiming to obtain, through forgetfulness of self, a true transformation of the view we take of others in the ordinary circumstances of life,” (24) and more. This in-depth look at how to mitigate the intended and unintended effects of interview by analyzing its structure provided a lot of insight into the implications that the process of interviewing has, and reading it in conjunction with Luker’s chapters increased its persuasiveness and effectiveness.
This is a good summary of the Luker and Bourdieu readings. I definitely see Luker as providing more a “how-to” manual to help researchers (even “precocious undergraduates”) determine which methodological tools are most appropriate for which kinds of data collection. And I see Bourdieu as being a bit more abstract about the ways that interviewers and their subjects can co-create successfully — or fail miserably at recognizing their mutual interdependence. One might say that Bourdieu is describing a salsa dancing relationship, in fact! I wonder if any of these methods or ideas will make their way into your own research. If they do, I’d love to hear how you reflect on the texts differently at the end of the summer.