DOING SOCIAL SCIENCE IN A HUMANISTIC MANNER 393humility in the face of the possibility that he might be wrong, coupled with the passionate conviction that he
is right (Yanow 1997).
- C.P. Snow (1959) attributed the decline of Western civilization to what he saw as the inability of
people versed in either side of an absolute split between two cultures, science (especially physics) and the
humanities, to comprehend elements on the other side (he was particularly concerned with the lack of what
today would be called “scientific literacy” among people who considered themselves educated intellectuals). - Geertz (quoted in Gerring 2003b, 27–28) expressed this point about research questions’ driving the
choice of methods in an interview: “[I]f you want to figure out traffic patterns in New York... I don’t think
you should spend a lot of time asking each individual driver what they were doing. It might help to give
some understanding but, in general, I would agree that the way to do it is to pick a place and measure the
number of cars that go by and correlate it with the time of day and find out how the traffic flow works.” He
clarified, however, that an “interpretivist tends not to ask that sort of question [about correlation] first. One
is trying to get a story, a meaning frame to provide an understanding of what’s going on” (Gerring 2003b,
27). Methodologically positivist research, such as that of McGwin, Metzger, and Rue (2004), is appropriate
and valuable for these reasons. - Modelers laud the “transparency” of their approach and contrast it with the ambiguities of other
language-based approaches. This characteristic has been offered as an explanation for why there may be
greater agreement among article reviewers examining mathematical models as compared to, say, among
reviewers examining comparative case studies. - How to Lie with Statistics (Huff 1993), Damned Lies and Statistics (Best 2001), and other such titles
play, of course, on such fears. See also Gusfield (1981) for an analysis of the policy-related power of numeri-
cal analyses. - The “evidence-based” movement in various areas of public policy (medicine, psychotherapy, wel-
fare, and education, among others) similarly treats “evidence” in a narrow way, restricting its meaning to the
controlled experimentation of laboratory research (Yanow “Evidence-Based Policy,” forthcoming). - Anthropologists venturing into medical and health-related realms contend with such situations as
well, for example when working with epidemiologists. Schwartz-Shea (2003) documents the dominance of
quantitative methods in political science doctoral curricula. - Such poignant self-disclosure typically, although not exclusively, comes from anonymous graduate
students. One may subscribe to Perestroika at [email protected];
see also Monroe (2005). The Post-Autistic Economics newsletter is available at http://www.paecon.net. - The relationship among scientists, power, and political regimes is complex historical and theoretical
terrain. Doctors and anthropologists in the Third Reich (see, e.g., Lifton 1986; Schafft 2004) and U.S. birth
control researchers (Franks 2005) are examples of scientists and research put to use by politicians in ways
that are, we hope, perceived as nefarious and unacceptable by contemporary readers. The Tuskegee experi-
ments (e.g., Jones 1981) and the ex post facto deliberations concerning exploding the atomic bomb over
Hiroshima illustrate other aspects of the concern. - For a fascinating, quite different commentary on the relations among political science, methodology,
and power, see “American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality,” specifically pages 661–62 (American
Political Science Association Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy 2004). Although the report
authors’ “inspirational” take on disciplinary history might be read with some sympathy, they ignore contem-
porary emphases on careerism (Luke 1999) as well as the early racism of the profession (R. Smith 1993). - Indirect but no less significant threats to interpretive research include the policies of some institu-
tional review boards (see note 2, p. 126, introduction to part II, for a brief discussion and citations), as well
as increasing corporatism in institutions of higher education in the United States. The corporate university’s
emphasis on productivity for productivity’s sake devalues time-intensive methodologies such as participant-
observation and ethnography, putting at risk the U.S. social sciences’ capacity to understand communities,
organizations, and governments in a richly textured, insider-perspective way. - See, for instance, Harding (1993), who argues for “strong objectivity,” which means taking positionality
into account so that the relationship of knowledge to power can be understood. She argues that the standard,
methodologically positivist assumption that scholarly position can be ignored produces “weak objectivity,”
in which power, such as class- or gender-based power, still operates but without accountability. - She continues: “In my cultural ineptitude, I represented for the people who met me the chaos of
meaninglessness.” This is an example of the reflexivity in writing characteristic of ethnographic, participant-
observer, and some other interpretive approaches and writers.