Hostname: page-component-f554764f5-68cz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-16T01:06:02.870Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Research, Identities, and Praxis: The Tensions ofIntegrating Identity into the Field Experience

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2009

Marshall Thompson
Marshall Thompson
Affiliation:
Northeastern Illinois University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Scientists seek to participate in the collective process ofcumulative knowledge building. As scientists, we are bound to theprinciple of objective neutrality in the assessment of our data andin the formulation of our inferences and conclusions. However, theproduction of knowledge does not need to be, and some would saycannot be, a valueless process, devoid of opinion. The imperativesfor the investigator are intellectual honesty, transparency inresearch, and objectivity in the assessment of data. If valuejudgments are accepted as permissible it is then worthwhile todiscuss the relationships between the investigator's identity, thosevalue judgments, and the design and conduct of research. Indeed,investigators possess multiple identities; these multiple identitiesmay, at various times and places, aid or impede the researchprocess. Moreover, these intersectional identities, and theinconsistency with which these identities are granted status invarious environments, leave the researcher well positioned toexplore social stratification, hierarchies of power, andinequality.

Type
Symposium
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 42 , Issue 2 , April 2009 , pp. 325 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Brantlinger, Ellen A. 1999. “Inward Gaze and Activism as Moral Next Steps in Inquiry.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 30 (4): 413–29.10.1525/aeq.1999.30.4.413CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1980. “Truth and Power.” In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Gordon, Colin. New York: Pantheon, 109–33.Google Scholar
Harding, Sandra. 1987. “Conclusion: Epistemological Questions.” In Feminism and Methodology, ed. Harding, Sandra. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 181–90.Google Scholar
Kasaba, Reşat. 1994. “A Time and a Place for the Nonstate: Social Change in the Ottoman Empire during the ‘Long Nineteenth Century.’” In State Power and Social Forces: Domination and Transformation in the Third World, ed. Migdal, Joel S., Kohli, Atul, and Shue, Vivienne. New York: Cambridge University Press, 207–30.10.1017/CBO9781139174268.011CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, Gary, Keohane, Robert O., and Verba, Sidney. 1994. Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lenski, Gerhard. 1954. “Status Crystallization: A Non-Vertical Dimension of Social Status.” American Sociological Review 19: 405–13.10.2307/2087459CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lenski, Gerhard. 1956. “Social Participation and Status Crystallization.” American Sociological Review 21: 458–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nagel, Ernest. 1968. “The Value Oriented Bias of Social Inquiry.” In Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, ed. Brodbeck, May. Toronto: Collier-Macmillan Canada, 98–113.Google Scholar
Olson, Mancur. 1965. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strauss, Leo. 1951. “The Social Science of Max Weber.” Measure 2: 211–14.Google Scholar
Weber, Max. 1968. “'Objectivity' in Social Science.” In Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, ed. Brodbeck, May. Toronto: Collier-Macmillan Canada, 85–97.Google Scholar