Perturbing the system: "Hard science," "soft science," and social science, the anxiety and madness of method

Human Organization, Summer 2002 by Cassell, Joan

"Objective" research is ill-equipped to deal with emotion-laden topics such as terminal illness, dying, and death. I am confronted daily with these issues during my current fieldwork in a hospital intensive care unit (ICU). Physicians are biased toward methods claiming to be "scientific," and many medical sociologists conspire to satisfy this predilection. When unable to conduct hypothesis-driven research, they strive to be value-neutral and "objective" in the field, thus avoiding the Hawthorne effect. But why bother, when the Heisenberg Effect still holds? A phallic metaphor valorizes "hard" science as masculine, while denigrating "soft" science as feminine. This paper examines and critiques the notion of value-neutral social research, where "objectivity" is equated with scientific legitimacy. A fieldworker can learn more from perturbing the system than from pretending to be an invisible fly on the wall.

Key words: intensive care units, death and dying, participant observation, "objective" research, United States

The Anxiety of Method

[lf] there is one point of consensus among so-- ciologists concerning field methods, it is this: the sociologist is there to study a social scene and not to change it, so whenever possible, do not interfere (Anspach 1993:211).

Sociologists tend to be much concerned with methods. Anthropologists have written about methods (e.g., Narroll and Cohen 1970; Pelto and Pelto1978; Weller and Romney 1990; Bernard 1994), but as a group they are generally more relaxed than sociologists and less impressed by what is frequently presented as the scientific paradigm: do not interfere with, and thus alter, the social scene under observation.

The history of the two disciplines may affect the level of methodological anxiety. Sociologists traditionally studied their own societies, where their activity could be observed by others. In addition, sociology has as ancestors Comte (1974), the father of positivism, who portrayed the natural sciences as branches with sociology at the summit, having the capacity to explain the phenomena uncovered by the lower branches, and Durkheim (1938, 1951), who advocated conceptualiz-- ing social facts as "things" to be objectively studied, classi-- fied, and measured apart from their individual occurrences.

The anthropological ancestors, on the other hand, were less concerned about the methodological purity of their data. Consider the Victorian anthropologist, J. G. Frazer, about whom the story is told that, when asked about natives he had known, responded, "But heaven forbid!" (Evans-Pritchard 1951:72): a British gentleman might write about "savages" but he did not associate with them. Then, think of Malinowski (1955:99), whose idyllic picture of being set down by him-- self on a tropical isle "paddling on the lagoon, watching the natives under the blazing sun at their garden work, following them through the patches of jungle and on the winding beaches and reefs" was challenged by the posthumous publi-- cation of his diaries (1967; Geertz 1967; Wax 1972). Finally, contemplate Evans-Pritchard, who wrote an anthropological classic, The Nuer (1940), based on intermittent, somewhat limited, visits to a group being "pacified" by military means during his study (Rosaldo 1986).1 Few readers were in a posi-- tion to check the methods or findings of the early anthropo-- logical studies of exotic peoples.

A Personal Note on Methodology2

As a graduate student in psychology in the mid- 1960s, I was disturbed by my course in experimental psychology. The young professor kept teaching the class how-how to identify and construct a "parsimonious" "elegant" "scien-- tific" experiment-while I kept trying to inquire why-why take all the trouble to do this? At the time, I lacked the lan-- guage and knowledge to formulate my gut reaction to her teachings, and she was too newly hatched from graduate school to understand my objections. It seemed to me, had I but words to express it, that the more elegant and well-- designed an experiment, the less it had to do with actual hu-- man beings relating to one another in the "booming buzzing confusion" of real life. After obtaining a master's degree in psychology, I switched with relief to a graduate program in anthropology, which promised to deal with human interac-- tion in real life and real time.

As an anthropology graduate student, however, I encoun-- tered an interesting phenomenon. Those professors, and au-- thorities assigned as course reading, who advocated "rigor-- ous" "formal" "scientific" methods disdained their colleagues who conducted "sloppy" "unscientific" research, whose writ-- ings were dismissed as a species of literature. The mantle of Science seemed to confer an unquestioned intellectual-and moral-superiority upon those who assumed it.

After graduating in 1975, it took me a long time to find my "voice." Eventually, I rejected my advisor's advice to write in the passive voice; it surely sounded more scientific, but was far duller. I also jettisoned the fly-on-the-wall fan-- tasy of the social scientist as a transparent unseen observer, who did her best not to influence the actions she was observ-- ing. Of course my presence influenced what went on. How could it not? Attempting not to influence what went on, whether in a rural Jamaican village or a feminist conscious-- ness-raising group, pretending not to influence it, writing as though what occurred was not affected, began to seem rather like Winnie the Pooh, rising skyward holding a balloon, hop-- ing he looked like a black cloud rather than a bear with a bal-- loon seeking honey. If this were "science," I wanted none of it.