Qual­it­at­ive Meth­ods

Course content

Generally speaking, when you want to know something about human beings, the university sorts researchers into two big piles – those who count and do math (quantitative researchers), and those who talk and care about meaning (qualitative researchers). This split, however, is a harmful fiction. There aren’t any “counting” methods that don’t make some sort of assessment of significance; and there are no meaning methods that don’t enumerate as part of their argument for validity. More to the point, there are no good questions you can ask about humans that wouldn’t require both counting and assertions of meaning.

So, if the quantitative/qualitative split is more a bureaucratic convenience than any sort of real comment on the operation of the human science, what are we left with? The very short answer is “specific objects of analysis.” That is to say, specific things that researchers assume exist out in the world and then allow them to do research. Sociologists tend to assume that there is some sort of thing like society out there in the world that they can know about. Similarly, anthropologists tend to act like there is something out there in the world like culture that they can know about. Each discipline has a sort of presupposition about the world, and then has developed methods that allow them to know about it.

This course will take culture and society as it’s starting points and introduce you to a few methods (interviewing methods, observational methods, library research) that allow you to answer questions human culture and human society. In addition to these methods, this course will teach you about designing research, analyzing data, and reporting on what you have learned.

Each class session will be divided in half and will start with a workshop on the previous week’s topic, and then a lecture on a new topic.