74 MEANING AND METHODOLOGY
A Focus on Persons and Processes. The separation between mind and act becomes clear in look-
ing at objectivity’s synonyms, all of which characterize various forms of “impersonality”:- detached
- distanced (held at arm’s length)
- dispassionate; without emotion
- neutral; without personal judgment
- factual
- value free
- impartial; not taking sides, treating all alike
- fair
- without bias; free from prior conceptions
The conceptual connotations of its antonym are “personal” and “involved” (not distant), “inter-
preted” (not factual), “biased” (not impartial), “distorted,” “prejudiced.” Textbook discussions
recapitulate these denotations and connotations. To take but one example—there are myriad—
and this one from an older anthropology-sociology text oriented toward field research, objective
means “to state the characteristics of objects and events as they exist and not to interpret, evaluate,
and prejudge them” (Spradley and McCurdy 1972, 13). Hence, to be objective means to reason
based on facts, rather than feelings, following the laws of logic, rather than emotion—even though
logic is itself an activity of mind and, hence, unobservable.
The synonyms as listed suggest a continuum between physical distance, at the one end, and
cognitive and/or emotional distance at the other—between, in other words, body and mind, onto-
logical “objectivity” and epistemological “objectivity.” Ontological objectivity posits a reality
external, physically, to the observer: The body is separate from the object in question, detached,
distanced, held at arm’s length. Epistemological objectivity—the cognizant, emoting mind that is
separate from the object in question—is captured in the second set of synonyms: dispassionate,
without emotion, neutral, value free, impartial, fair, unbiased. “Objectivity,” in general methods
discussion, posits a link between physicality (bodily presence and proximity) and ways of know-
ing, including affect, experience, and prior knowledge (as in prejudgment), such that physically
distancing the researcher’s body from the research situation can and will disengage his cognition
and empathy from generating or shaping understanding. In this view, being physically outside of
what one is studying enables standing as an epistemological outsider: It is humanly possible (in
this view) to know one’s subject of study—to observe it, and to describe and make sense of those
observations—without influence of any sort on either observation or description (in oral or writ-
ten narrative). Perceptions of objective reality are completely autonomous from the observing
subject, independent from the observing mind—and the act of observing (e.g., the presence of the
observer) does not affect that which is being observed.^17
Several methodological terms bespeak an ontological objectivity. “Data” are “that which are
given”; researchers “discover” evidence and produce research “findings.” These terms suggest
that the patterns “unearthed” through research processes were always there, waiting to be found,
rather than constructed by naming. A sense of ontological objectivity underlies what Eugene
Webb and his colleagues originally called “unobtrusive measures” of social phenomena (Webb et
al. 1981 [1966]): indicators of social status that a researcher could observe and interpret without
having to ask questions of those who had created or used them, “found objects,” as it were, whose
meaning rested entirely in their physical existence.^18
There is another dimension at play here, however, concerning the reactivity of the objects’
users to the way research questions might be articulated (or to any other nonverbal aspect of the