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Luker, Salsa Dancing Into the Social Sciences SALSA DANCING INTO THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences h Research in an Age of Info-glut Kristin Luker HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2008 Copyright © 2008 by Kristin Luker All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Luker, Kristin. Salsa dancing into the social sciences : research in an age of info-glut / Kristin Luker. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-03157-9 (alk. paper) 1. Social sciences—Research. 2. Social sciences—Methodology. I. Title. H62.L7995 2008 300.72—dc22 2008018302 Contents 1 Salsa Dancing? In the Social Sciences? 1 2 What’s It All About? 22 3 An Ode to Canonical Social Science 40 4 What Is This a Case of, Anyway? 51 5 Reviewing the Literature 76 6 On Sampling, Operationalization, and Generalization 99 7 Getting Down to the Nitty-Gritty 129 8 Field (and Other) Methods 155 9 Historical-Comparative Methods 190 10 Data Reduction and Analysis 198 11 Living Your Life as a Salsa-Dancing Social Scientist 217 vi Contents Appendix One: What to Do If You Don’t Have a Case 229 Appendix Two: Tools of the Trade 233 Appendix Three: Special Resources for Specific Methods 236 Appendix Four: Sample Search Log 242 Notes 243 Bibliography 285 Author’s Note 311 Acknowledgments 312 Index 315 SALSA DANCING INTO THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 1 h Salsa Dancing? In the Social Sciences? I’m serious. Really I am. About the salsa dancing part, that is. After years of teaching incredibly smart graduate students at Berkeley, UC San Diego, and Princeton, I’ve come to believe that salsa dancing (or any other enterprise that makes you hot and sweaty and takes your mind off your work) is absolutely essential to successful re- search in the social sciences these days, from sociology to political science, from anthropology to education, from social work to psy- chology. It might seem that dancing doesn’t have a lot to do with so- cial research, and doing social research is probably why you picked this book up in the first place. But bear with me. Salsa dancing is a “practice” (a word I’ll be using a lot in this book) as well as a meta- phor for a kind of research that will make your life easier and better; and if you stick with me through this first chapter, I promise to tell you why.1 Actually going to a salsa dancing club has been known to work wonders for untangling knotty research problems in the social sci- ences. As your partner holds you close, the Internal Censor (that 2 SALSA DANCING INTO THE SOCIAL SCIENCES part of you that tells you not only are you terminally stupid, but no self-respecting social scientist would even consider doing the re- search you have in mind) gets lulled off-guard by the seductive rhythms of salsa. As your shoes trace new patterns on the dance floor and your hips start to swivel, a different part of your mind takes over and you find yourself drifting into new intellectual areas, making connections across boundaries and even across disciplines. You sud- denly find yourself knowing things you didn’t know you knew. It is my deeply held conviction that the very best social science research of the coming era will be exactly this kind of research—re- search that draws on the kinds of bold and interdisciplinary insights you can get when you salsa-dance. But be warned: you can’t just show up at a salsa dancing palace and expect to have as much fun as you should without having done at least a little training ahead of time. For all its improvisational nature, salsa dancing builds on some very specific steps. It’s just that kind of training which this book aims to teach you as it trains you to be a “salsa-dancing social scientist.” What do I mean by being a salsa-dancing social scientist? Over many years of struggles with my own research and with helping those aforementioned very smart graduate students, I’ve come up with a certain way of doing research that aims to hit that sweet spot between the rigor and theory-building capacities of canonical quan- titative social science research, and the emergent, open-ended, and pragmatic capabilities of traditional field research.2 Another aspect of this sweet spot where salsa-dancing social science exists is that the questions we address using this method fall at the intersection of what has come to be called “public sociology” and “critical sociol- ogy” (feel free to insert the name of your own particular discipline here). We ask questions that have important implications for the larger society (i.e., “public sociology”), but one of the ways we ask those questions is to start out by assuming that at least part of the problem is that the way the question is traditionally asked is prob- lematic (i.e., “critical sociology”). If I had to free-associate a list of terms that define salsa-dancing social science, I would say that it’s Salsa Dancing? In the Social Sciences? 3 holistic and attentive to context, conceptually innovative, method- ologically agnostic research that sees itself as socially embedded, is strongly committed to building theory in a cumulative way, and is deeply attentive to questions of power.3 I plan to show you how to do this salsa-dancing research by carry- ing out three different enterprises in this book, and, like salsa danc- ers themselves, the three tasks I have set for myself (and you) will wind themselves around each other in the course of the pages that follow. I start out by taking seriously the cliché among philosophers of science these days that the ways we go about studying the social world are themselves deeply embedded in that very world. This book will use the history of social science research methods to argue that most of what we think of as “good” social science, as well as many of our ideas about how to go about achieving it, are shot through and through with what Pierre Bourdieu calls “doxa”—those taken-for-granted ideas that are so much a part of our social world that we rarely even notice them.4 In concrete terms, I will argue that the political, social, and historical context in which specific “re- search methods” grew up, as well as the power relations among dif- ferent kinds of stakeholders, have indelibly shaped what we have come to think of as “scientific” and “rigorous” research. You might think of this as a paralyzing insight, since it stands to reason that the kinds of research you and I are about to embark on are socially situated as well. I actually find it quite a liberating in- sight, and I hope that by the end of the book you will too. Which brings me to my second goal in this book: I plan to teach you con- crete guidelines on the equivalent of those few key steps you need to know in order to salsa-dance in the social sciences. I will teach you how to go about doing rigorous, compelling, and intellectually hon- est research, even in the shadow of the knowledge that “research methods” are not now, and never were, pristine, ahistorical social practices that were handed down from on high.5 Finally, my third and last task in this book will be to give you solid 4 SALSA DANCING INTO THE SOCIAL SCIENCES advice about how to survive the process of doing high-quality salsa- dancing research in the shadow of uncertainty while keeping your sanity intact, and even how to have fun in the process.6 I am going to guide you through all the phases of a research project, from concep- tualizing it, to executing it, to defending it from people who may hold a more orthodox view of how to do research. You see, it’s not just the orthodox methods of doing social science themselves that have become frozen with an excess of “doxa,” but a rigid and often puritanical set of beliefs have grown up about the best way of getting that research done. Taken-for-granted assump- tions in academia about how hard to work, when to work, and how and what to read, just to mention a few of the sacred cows I plan to push gently off the road, are often relics of a very different era. All they do is make you miserable and slow you down from the exciting and meaningful work you should be doing.7 My own personal trajectory is that I was trained in quantitative methods but discovered early on that the kinds of things I wanted to know about weren’t easily amenable to those kinds of methods. But then when I turned to qualitative methods, I found that I was missing some of the rigor and logic that I had grown to appreciate from quantitative research. And as the issues of modern life became more pressing, I worried about the incapacity of qualitative methods to fully address questions of power. Over the years, that missing piece, that sweet spot I mentioned between the two traditional forms of social science, came to bother me more and more. The rise of postmodernism and what I call info-glut meant that my craving for something different became even more acute. I’ll mostly be talking about qualitative methods in this book, because they are best fitted to the kinds of research my students want to do, but there is no rea- son for you aspiring quantitative researchers not to take the guide- lines for salsa dancing in the social sciences and use them in any way that works for you.
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