After reading Gang Leader for a Day, I didn't walk away with too
many new insights about gangs than I gained from five seasons of the
Wire. I got the impression that the big findings about poverty and
gangs were in his other writings. He mentioned an article that he wrote
with Steven Levitt about the low pay of street level drug dealers, but
he doesn't give us much more information about that. He describes a
police force and CHA that was even more corrupt than I suspected and
some surprising coping tactics that the people of the projects utilize
in order to survive. All interesting stuff, but he doesn't tie his
findings with larger theories of poverty or make connections with other
research.
But this book isn't really about poverty and gangs. It's about doing qualitative research. Sudhir
isn't a rogue sociologist because he's studying gangs. He's a rogue,
because he isn't crunching numbers in a university office isolated from
the subject of his research. He clearly says that he was turned off by
the sterile and life-less quantitative research in sociology and wanted
to learn about people by talking to them. Bias be damned.
Does
qualitative research really set you up as an outsider in the social
sciences? Yes. In political science, the preference for quantitative
research is glaringly obvious. The top political science journal,APSR, only contains quantitative studies. You can get published somewhere with qualitative research, but it really does set you up on the margins of the field.
I
don't have any problem with good quantitative research. Big statistical
studies are great for answering certain political questions, just as
other questions can only be answered by talking to people. The problems
is that the qualitative questions are no longer being asked. And the
pressure to create regression charts is so extreme that anything and
everything is turned into a number and really bizarre studies are
emerging.
Let's talk about the research on blogs, a topic that
you all know very well. I have seen countless studies on blogs that
revolve around blogrolls. Why? Blogrolls are things that you set up
when you first start your blog and are really meaningless. But
blogrolls can be counted. Incoming and outgoing links can be counted.
Ergo, lots of studies on links and blogrolls. Very, very few studies
actually talking to bloggers.
So, Sudhir's book is really the
tale of doing quantitative research. How he gradually got to know his
subjects and how one connection led to many others. He talks about the
ethical issues that come out doing qualitative research. When you deal
directly with people, things can get messy. They can become attached to
you. You can relate too much to them and lose perspective. Sudhir
constantly needs to remind himself that the gang members are violent
and they aren't community leaders as they try to portray themselves.
Sudhir
also draws parallels between himself and the drug dealers. Everybody is
hustling. He's hustling for data and contacts and information that will
give him academic recognition, just as the gang leaders are always
looking for angles to make money. In some ways, perhaps the gang
leaders are more honest about their work.Sudhir discusses the complicated relationships between himself and his subjects.
I
would have liked more thought about the ethics and the process of
qualitative research. For example, the fact that Sudhir was a big,
dark-skinned guy surely helped him form relationships with his
subjects. He might have been an outsider in the projects, but not as
glaringly different as I would have been.
My hope is that this book puts qualitative research back in vogue. It gets a new cohort of academics back in the field.
I also hope that this book shows academics how to write popular non-fiction. Sudhir
does not use a single scientific notation in this book, because (Doe
1987) scientific (Stuffy 1990) notations (Pundit 2001) are (Smarty
2009) boring and hard (Chart 2003) to read (Chuckles 2002). I just
want academics to write stuff that other people find useful and
interesting. Most academics don’t even read their own journals. Almost
nobody readsAPSR. If we’re not reading this stuff, then we can’t be surprised that nobody else is.
This book does not provide policy prescriptions, though this is also clearly needed in our discipline. In The Washington Post, Joseph Nye despaired about the lack of policy specifics in academic research in foreign affairs.
develop mathematical models, new methodologies or theories expressed in
jargon that is unintelligible to policy-makers. A survey of articles
published over the lifetime of the American Political Science Review
found that about one in five dealt with policy prescription or
criticism in the first half of the century, while only a handful did so
after 1967. Editor LeeSigelman observed in the journal’s centennial issue that “if `speaking truth to power’ and contributing directly to public dialogue
about the merits and demerits of various courses of action were still
numbered among the functions of the profession, one would not have
known it from leafing through its leading journal.”
So, I liked Gang Leader for the Day, not for its descriptions of
inner city life, because I really want to cheer for anybody who puts
down the regression models and tries something new.
(Disclaimer — I have the mute kid home from school today and he is
demanding attention. Humpf. Next, he'll probably want me to feed him or
something. So, no chance for links or a spell check. sorry.)
UPDATE: Dan Drezner reacts to the Joe Dye article.
Apt. 11d 
You are so right about political science and quantitiative research. Hubby’s in poli sci and civil/military relations. The problem is that there isn’t an established method for quantifying much of his field… BUT, even though his dissertation actually establishes one, he was discounted by the quant people. It’s so bad he’s decided to go to law school.
i’m actually quite worried about the direction of the discipline, because the quant people don’t understand that the origin of their data sets is qualitative — and that there exist some compelling and important questions that cannot be described by numbers.
I’m also concerned because the quantitative approach is so dull, it tends to discourage students from majoring in it — and at many colleges, lack of majors = lack of power, faculty, resources etc.
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“Almost nobody reads APSR.”
But, they all leaf the index to see who they know is getting published. I did my courses in non-quantitative methods, but didn’t go any further than that. Of course, all of the research I did was public opinion related.
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Oh, I love the smell of flamebait in the morning. Didn’t we as the discipline have this tussle publicly already once in this era?
“The top political science journal, APSR, only contains quantitative studies.” This statement is hokum, right? All approaches think they are underrepresented in APSR, don’t they? The most recent issue (103:1) comprises articles, mostly all with some quant tables except one article on political thought, but the issue prior (102:4) is a smörgåsbord of political theory-oriented papers on human rights, Hamilton, Locke, and discursive representation (wtfti). philosopherP asserts that the quant approach is “dull,” but this is troublesome as a critique, as I’m sure we can find lots of smart people who think discursive representation, veils of ignorance, and justice dull too. Without trying to rehash all the KKV battles of the past fifteen years, I just want to say that methods are tools and it is good to have a few in your toolbox, including reasonably sophisticated quantitative ones. Some really good civ/mil studies are quantitative (Feaver and TISS, e.g.), but the really important foundational stuff is qualitative. The most prestigious civ/mil conference is very much a qualitative affair, where I, as someone who uses quant skills, am in the minority. And that’s okay.
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Yes, APSR does publish non-quantitative research if it’s political theory. But that’s not qualitative research. How many studies have appeared in APSR in the past year that involved field work and interviews, such as the great work of one Georgian scholar that we know? Maybe one or two?
Method are just tools. Totally agree.
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APRS, by virtue of coming with APSA membership, has the widest circulation so every one bitches if their types of articles don’t get in. However, ISQ has better coupons and JoP runs “Family Circus,” so you might be better-off trying to get in one of those.
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Hey, glad you found the Nye article (and found it for me — I hate it when I’ve read something I can’t properly cite).
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I think Alexander George started a round of worry about the policy relevence of poli sci back in the 90s. Obviously, it didn’t take.
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I haven’t seen anyone criticize Venkatesh for being “too qualitative”. But he had a creepy disregard for the dignity of and his effect on the safety of his subjects.
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Hmm. Wonder what sort of IRB he had…. Did they have to sign a waiver?
As to someone’s qualitative scholarship on Georgia and the APSR, clearly it is only because she has never submitted an article there.
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Mark Kleiman was gathering IRB horror stories week before last. If his cup is not already overflowing, you might send some his way.
Sudhir is a rogue sociologist because he or his publisher think that subtitle will sell books. They’re probably right. Is it too early to start a pool on whether “rogue foo” will last longer as a publishing fad than “how baz changed the world”?
From the description of the book, it sounds like Sudhir is dangerously close to committing long-form journalism. That’s a felony these days, isn’t it? I suspect that, in addition to physics envy, there’s a fear of journalism making up part of the reluctance to publish qualitative studies.
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This entry also reminded me a little bit of last week’s edition of Ask Reich-Ranicki (sorry for the hideous URL)(and for the German, now that I think about it).
R-R talks about his difficulty changing the literature pages of his newspaper from something that was written for specialists into something that was written by knowledgeable people for a wide audience (this by way of making a point about homosexuality and one of Thomas Mann’s sons)(it’s a roundabout point, which is nearly a given considering that it’s in German)(for which I already apologized, didn’t I?)(I should probably also apologize for the parentheses about now).
He says, “I had to part ways with no small number of these critics because they couldn’t be bothered to write more simply and more understandably.” And later he adds, “Through the ages, there have been two kinds of writers, critics and even journalists: those who write well and those who have time on their hands.” Sounds like Sudhir.
Anyway, aren’t there two separate questions here? One is academics writing for a non-specialist audience; the other is opening the learned journals in a field to qualitative research. They seem separate, if related.
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IRBs are a very recent development. There was no IRB committee at my grad school in the late 90s when I started my dissertation. I interviewed a ton of people with no IRB approval.
Yes, there are two separate issues in this post, Doug. I had a lot on my mind, and I spat it out in one big lougie.
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Or as the Germans say, one big “sptizensnotgobber”.
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Relaxen und watchen das Blinkenlights.
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