Interpretation and Method Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn

76 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY

Research in nonverbal communication suggests yet another dimension of the impossibility of

detached knowledge. Although survey researchers continue to refine survey instruments in an

effort to minimize interviewer effects, if not to eliminate them outright,^24 research in nonverbal

communication, including paralanguage (e.g., tone of voice), personal decor (such as dress), and

facial and other gestures suggests that the researcher’s mere presence potentially can affect the

process of the research—and what’s more, the researcher may not know in what ways it has.^25

The preceding definitional discussion points to the philosophical context for objectivity’s con-

cern with what constitutes the mind and whether things exist external to it or are “products” of it.

Here is where object (evidence), act/process (its creation), and actor (its creators) begin to be

intertwined. The philosophical debate distinguishes between “the real”—what exists in nature,

and is therefore understood as having its own reality external to the human mind—and “the

ideal”—what exists in or is created by an individual mind in its thoughts or experiences.^26 “Sub-

jective,” in this sense, refers to the latter, and “objective” means that which has existence inde-

pendent of experience or thought.^27 By extension, then, “objective” refers to something that is

based on observable phenomena (bracketing the matter of the act of observing) rather than on

unobservable thoughts or mind.^28 Following on the real-ideal dichotomy, if something subjective

exists only in the mind, it is not real; it is illusory, deriving from one’s own consciousness.

The pejorative sense of subjective emerges, then, not only from its connotations of bias but

from its connections with the personal, the emotional, and the “non-real.” A subjective response

is not just (seen as) idiosyncratic and/or potentially unfair due to unfounded prejudice; it is asso-

ciated with a phenomenological preoccupation with the self, with one’s own consciousness and

emotional states: a moody self-absorption divorced from engagement with the “real” (objective)

world.^29 If a response is emotional, it is non- or irrational; if it does not lie in the realm of the

rational, it is, ipso facto, not scientific.

The presumed fact-value dichotomy, seen clearly in public policy studies, draws on this real-

ideal distinction, in which values are seen as belonging to the realm of the nonrational and ideal.

Since its development in the 1970s, the policy analysis field has been concerned that analysts’

values would taint their analyses. The critique of epistemological objectivity also raised ques-

tions about policy “objects”: were policies themselves value-free? Early on, the possibility of the

value-free policy analyst (and hence analysis) was rejected. The initial solution proposed that

analysts identify their biases, make them explicit, set them aside, and go about their work. In this

vein, they could then separate out policy facts from policy values and avoid attending to the value

context within which directly observable acts, objects, and language are situated. The critical

rejoinder argued that the so-called fact-value dichotomy was erroneous. From an interpretive

perspective, such separation, whether within the analyst or of the policies themselves, is an im-

possibility, as Hawkesworth (1988, 58–72) pointed out: It institutionalizes facts and values as

separate realms, on the one hand treating values as if they were objects that could be separated

from their creators-believers and externalized, and on the other, not problematizing the constitu-

tion of facts.^30

The Procedural Defense: Trustworthy Research and Faithful Knowing

The charge that interpretive research is not objective emerges also from conceptions of its proce-

dures that reflect a lack of awareness or misperceptions of what such methods actually involve.

One of these is the concern that the researcher is generating idiosyncratically personal knowledge

that cannot possibly be trustworthy. The concern is for the outcomes of this perceived idiosyn-

crasy, including, but not limited to, its potential for bias: Personal knowledge is seen not as neutral