124 ACCESSING AND GENERATING DATA
in reality they’re no good? The refrigerator is more than twenty years old... The television was
a gift... I didn’t purchase it. The washing machine... was a [piece of junk]... that washed
only when I begged it by saying ‘please’” (2001, 154). She apparently saw her answers as coun-
terbalancing those of her neighbors, who claimed to have appliances they could not afford be-
cause of the symbolic value—the status—they perceived attached to such possession, which would
“elevate their image in their own and the census-takers’ eyes” (2001, 154).
It would be too simplistic to say that such respondents are “lying,” or that governments “lie”
through statistics. We see these responses, rather, as an element of the “presentation of self”
(Goffman 1959): of the conscious and willing construction of a “front stage” that presents what is
perceived, whether by individuals or by governments or by organizations or some other collec-
tive, as a desirable persona or image, in an effort to mask a less desirable “back stage.”^6
These are the sorts of issues that Dean McHenry engages in chapter 10. He looks at the three
categories for studying political protest that appear in a widely accepted and widely used data-
base, the Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive. These categories—riots, strikes, and demon-
strations—were developed by Arthur Banks based on reading the New York Times accounts of
events in India. But from his own lived experience there, McHenry came to understand that these
categories did not adequately identify the multitude of forms of political protest carried out by
Indians, for which they had many more than three names. McHenry asks, then, what the wide-
spread adoption of such experience-distant categorical language does for our understanding of
events. What sense can we make of the numbers toted up and reported in such databases if the
assumptions underlying category definitions are derived from some experience other than the
one the researcher is trying to understand—indeed, from one so distant, physically and conceptu-
ally, from the subject of study that the analytic categories do not do justice to actors’ lived expe-
riences? What sort of faith, interpretive or otherwise, can we place in numerical analyses generated
in such fashion?
It is not only geographic distance that produces such conceptual-experiential distortions. Similar
discrepancies arise from official—state—statistics that indicate, for example, the number of “tra-
ditional birth attendants” trained in the latest obstetrical medical procedures, usage rates of mod-
ern delivery tools and of more “sanitary” sterilization techniques for boiling the tools, and so on
(Jordan 1989). On the basis of these numbers, the state reports (e.g., to the World Health Organi-
zation) on the extent of medical coverage provided to ever increasing numbers of rural communi-
ties otherwise not served by hospitals, and perhaps this translates into United Nations funding.
But, as Jordan so richly details, at graduation ceremonies certificates are awarded to midwives
who had help from staff in taking the written objective tests—which in her view “measure changes
in linguistic repertoire and discourse strategies” (1989, 6) more than the degree to which mid-
wives incorporate the training into their repertoires of practice:For measuring behavioral effects, simple interviewing [as in a survey] is inadequate.... It
is not that the midwives lie.... As competent social actors, they adjust their way of talking
to the person they are talking to.... [T]he trainers never appreciate the ways in which the
statistics they compile have little to do with reality. They orient to the statistical require-
ments of the national bureaucracy and when they go out into the communities they carry
with them [this] way of looking at the world.... (1989, 7)^7What is required, in Jordan’s view, are detailed observations made “by someone who has the
midwives’ confidence and is allowed to accompany them on births and pre- and postnatal visits,
since the only way one can find out about utilization of what they have learned is to be there on