Abstract
Here is an idea for a graduate methods course: Require students to write an extended critique of an exemplary research article or book in their field of interest. In addition to summarizing the work’s substantive contributions, the critique should pay particular attention to the strengths and weaknesses of the research design and methods employed. The critiques are presented and discussed in class, with a view to generating a set of methodological principles that separates good research from the other kind.
This volume is based on that general idea, except the critiques are pre-written. Fiona Devine and Sue Heath invited their colleagues at the Universities of Manchester and Southampton, respectively, to write essays evaluating an important research piece that has appeared over the past decade in their field of expertise. The essays—covering time-use diaries, online game culture, prison violence, globalization, Goth, Brazilian soap operas, the partitioning of India, news interviews, and multigenerational families—form eight of the nine chapters of this volume (the other chapter is an overview provided by the editors).
The results are mixed. On one hand, the essays for the most part are thoughtful and well-written. On the other hand, the book fails to meet its stated objective of introducing students to issues of method so that they can “do social science.” Because the volume is essentially a compilation of book reviews, Reviewing Social Science would be a more apt title than Doing Social Science.
All eight essays examine books that have appeared in the past decade. Graeme Kirkpatrick discusses Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture (2006), which is based on T.L. Taylor’s ethnographic study of the Massive Multiplayer Game (MMPG) Everquest. MMPGs are three-dimensional games that can be accessed by thousands of players simultaneously. Each player creates and controls an in-game character called an avatar. A central issue here is the question of self-hood and, specifically, whether and to what extent a player’s avatar reflects an “additional self.” Kirkpatrick discusses the pros and cons of the methods used by Taylor, as a participant observer in Everquest, to address such questions. Kirkpatrick’s account is a good read (if only because of the topic), and readers who are unfamiliar with MMPGs will learn a lot from this case study.
Dale Southerton provides another strong chapter in his assessment of Jonathan Gershuny’s Changing Times (2000), a cross-national study of time use based on time-diary surveys. Of all the essays, this one provides the most methodological nourishment. Southerton begins by noting that getting reliable data on how people actually use their time is central to the issue of group differences in well-being, since groups might greatly differ in how they use this precious resource (i.e., how much time is spent in paid work, in unpaid work, in leisure activities, and so on). Time-use diaries, then, are potentially important tools for social scientists, and Southerton’s essay on Changing Times provides the best discussion I have seen of the strengths and limitations of these diaries.
Other chapters of note include Wendy Bottero’s essay on Globalization and Belonging (2005) by Michael Savage, Gaynor Bagnall, and Brian Longhurst; Paul Sweetman’s essay on Paul Hodkinson’s Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture (2002); and Christian Greiffenhagen’s essay on The News Interview: Journalists and Public Figures on the Air (2002) by Steven Clayman and John Heritage. Globalization and Belonging is notable because, as Bottero observes, the authors shifted their aims and theoretical direction in the middle of their research project. Goth, on the other hand, is noteworthy in part for reflecting the famous warning of Sherlock Holmes that “It is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts” (“The Adventure of the Second Stain”). As Sweetman explains, Hodkinson’s style of participant observation research reflects a reaction to influential 1970s and 1980s work on subcultures by Paul Willis and others associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). Unlike the CCCS work—which has been criticized for privileging theoretical interpretations over the views of subculture members—Goth focuses on the details of the subcultures themselves, on how the subculture actually works. Finally, The News Interview is noteworthy because it draws on conversation analysis to provide the first systematic book-length analysis of news interviews as a distinctive form of interaction.
In short, Doing Social Science is a series of lengthy book reviews, much longer than one would find in Contemporary Sociology, for example. Generally they are excellent reviews. The most obvious audience for this book, then, are readers who would like to see more thorough summaries and critiques of the eight books. So if you are interested in any of the topics listed in the second paragraph above, this book could be for you.
The book’s objective, however, was quite different: to help graduate students in “doing social science.” What, then, do these eight chapters add up to, methodologically? According to Devine and Heath in the overview chapter, there are four lessons to be learned: that theory and method are related, that sampling and measurement are important, that social scientists need to worry about reflexivity in their research, and that questions of interpretation loom large in social science.
That is a rather thin yield for a 216-page book, and it is scarcely the stuff that will assist “students throughout the social sciences” to attain the “skills to evaluate the research of others and carry out their own research projects,” as the book jacket claims. I daresay that students would learn more about methods by selecting their own articles and writing their own critiques. Several weeks devoted to classroom discussion of those student essays almost certainly would generate a more substantial and telling list of principles for doing social science.