NEITHER RIGOROUS NOR OBJECTIVE? 75interaction with the researcher). What was “unobtrusive” was the researcher’s presence; and,
indeed, in the second edition the beginning of the book title was changed to Nonreactive Mea-
sures (Webb et al. 1981 [1966]). The language of nonreactivity emerges from the concern for
epistemological objectivity—the extent to which something about the observer’s “person” might
affect those being observed such that they would alter their acts or behavior or words.^19 In survey
research this is articulated as the concern for “interviewer effects”: that something in the way a
question is asked will affect the response, leading to skewed data (e.g., answers that reflect what
the respondent thinks the researcher wants to hear or what is socially acceptable to say); and
survey design assays to control for such effects. Terms and concepts such as these rest on a view
of science and its theories as holding a mirror up to nature (Rorty 1979).
The Philosophical Critique
Interpretive philosophies reject the human possibility of such social scientific mirroring. In their
view, social realities and human knowledge of them are created by human actors through our
actions and interactions. We are not and cannot be outside of them: Researchers see and name
patterns in other human actions because we are human ourselves, and it is our humanity, first and
foremost, that enables such empathetic recognition of human reaction to human experience. But
that means that these patterns exist as much in our habits and practices of sight itself (not only as
individuals, but as members of communities of knowing and practice, as well; see below) as in
what we are seeing. Theories, in this view, do not mirror the social world; they constitute interpre-
tations of it. Being at a physical remove, then, from what we study does not guarantee cognitive-
emotional separateness. In fact, interpretive research challenges the idea that understanding is
even possible from a position of cognitive externality. Even those forms of research done at some-
thing of a physical remove from their topics of study—historical or database analysis—rely, at one
point or another, on human understanding to get “inside” the research subject (history, in a projected
imagining; databases, in the original survey interaction; see McHenry, chapter 10, this volume, on a
related point). And some forms of research, such as space analysis, draw on the researcher’s kines-
thetic experience, itself requiring physical presence (see chapter 20, this volume).
Central to this argument about the impossibility of physical-cognitive detachment are certain
human physical limitations. One is that we do not observe without “filtering” what we see. We
categorize as we go along, sorting the multitude of sensorial stimuli into conceptual “mailboxes”
that focus and shape attention selectively.^20 Without prior knowledge, without some prior “con-
ceptual boxes” (Kuhn 1970) or “toeholds of the mind” (Vickers, personal communication, Janu-
ary 1981), we could not organize all the stimuli that come at our senses; we would, in a cognitive
sense, be “blind” to them.^21 A phenomenological approach suggests that all humans, including
researchers, perceive the world of their experiences through “lenses” composed over time from
various elements: education and training; lived experience, work/professional, kinesthetic, and
otherwise; familial, communal, societal background; personal psychology, temperament, and
so forth. Although these lenses may be expanded, researchers’ observations may still be shaped,
unconsciously, by their theories and other perspectives.^22 As science studies also show, analy-
sis is inherently a shaping of “reality,” rather than an exact point-for-point recapitulation of
sense data.
Time poses another physical constraint. Even if human sense organs were physically capable
of attending to every detail in an observed setting, researchers typically do not have sufficient
time to note all these stimuli. We not only see much more than we can take in; we lack the time to
read it all or to write it all down.^23