Future Plans

I am unsure if I will be going on for my PhD directly after my MA. This is because at some level I have become disillusioned with a large part of academia. I feel that many of the debates that are carried out between the smartest people in the world are more semantic than substantive. While two researchers may, for the most part, agree on some fundamental issue, they are split on something like the "level of analysis" or whether a particular hypothesis adequately takes into account context. Though the differences may seem huge to the individual researchers, the policy prescriptions that would come out of them often seem rather similar.

Currently I plan to work within the field of public policy. For me public policy or possibly an activist oriented NGO would be a good place for me. I am interested in working on what I see as issues of substance. I really enjoy studying issues of inequality and neo-liberalism. I think that neo-liberalism is an overarching hegemonic social structure that affects our daily lives in a myriad of ways. These include things as distant as the rise and fall in the value of the American dollar and as close as the price of food and gas. Most interesting for me is that it represents a fundamental shift in the way governments think about legislation and their role in public policy.

Through my graduate work I have come to focus specifically on health and health policy as an important area of legislation. For me health policy represents a fundamental social good that the state must play a role in for it to function adequately. The pitfalls of health for profit can be seen through the structural inadequacies and inequalities that are experienced throughout the U.S. system. The argument goes that the market can provide goods and services at a lower cost and more efficiently than with government "interference." In the empirical literature on health we see no support for this notion. The U.S. has some of the least efficient health distribution and the highest per capita costs for health in the world. While this post is not about health policy per se, I do see myself as working towards fundamental changes in health in the U.S. I appreciate and plan to use a wide range of empirical and qualitative academic literature to inform the policies that I eventually will work toward. I feel confident enough in my training to be able to interpret the literature and create informed and relevant measures that could be implemented at a wide range of levels of government. Though I still think that it is important for my work to face the scrutiny of peer review. For that I plan to still look at trying to publish in academic journals. Simply the creation of "gray" papers doesn't sufficiently fulfill my ideas about the role of a sociological researcher, even in the realm of public policy.

Defining Yourself

It is interesting how something as abstract as an ontology or epistemology can be used to define someone without their consent. I have come to be defined as the "quantitative guy" in my graduate cohort because I am the only one perceived to be doing statistical analysis. There is at least one other student who is using quantitative methods, though in a more mixed approach, in her thesis. Also there are other students that will be basing at least some part of their work on research that was previously carried out using quantitative methods. It is interesting because before coming here, there would have been no reason for me to think of myself as a quantitative researcher.

One difficulty I am facing in my research methods class is that many in the class clearly have not had even a basic statistics course, or if they have that it was long enough ago that it has all been forgotten. This is frustrating because the questions that are asked reflect their ignorance of even basic statistics and sampling techniques. Instead of helpful critiques, I am forced to defend ideas of approximation of the normal curve, random sampling, representativeness and inferential statistics. Many of these ideas have been sufficiently settled and the real debate is about improving methods and refining techniques. Having to defend an entire discipline to people who are completely opposed to its even existence, is tedious at best and insulting at worst. The questions that were asked were not asked to improve my project, but instead to fulfill their own prejudice against a particular method in the social sciences.

Statistics, like any other method, cannot be taken uncritically and must be examined in the context of what is being studied. Though I think that often the condemnation of statistics is misplaced and ill-informed. Statistics may be overused in the media and politics, but that does not mean that they can't be used in a more appropriate way. Through conducting research in a transparent and reflexive manner, the methods that are used come to be sufficiently problematized. By problematizing our methods we can see more clearly the limitations and ways to counter-act these limitations.

In my thesis I am attempting to use statistics in a reflexive way that I think sufficiently engages with the limitations that I face. By using statistics I am accepting that at some level they can give a probabilistic view of society. Though I also understand they they can never reflect perfectly the social reality that they attempt to investigate. By continuing to reflect and being aware of these issues, I feel that I can use statistics without falling into overstating my conclusions or misrepresenting my analysis.

Pragmatism and Critical Realism

In my undergraduate education both of the departments I studied in were very applied. This applied approach was more pronounced in the sociology department but political science was not far behind. It is interesting to come to a completely different type of department. The focus of many in the department is much more theoretical and abstract than anything I am used to. I don't think I ever could have imagined having to grapple as intensely with the ontology and epistemology of all aspects of my graduate experience. While at some level I enjoy this new way of approaching research, in other ways I have come to resent it.

The resentment, I would imagine, comes largely from my past experience with research. I originally left biology, in large part, because I didn't feel like I could help enact the types of social change that seemed fundamental at the time. What I found in sociology and political science were the tools and methodologies that allowed me to identify causes of serious social problems. Also important was the idea instilled in us that we were responsible to work for the change we saw as necessary. The idea of praxis become extremely important for me. The idea that expanding our social knowledge is not enough. That social change is an important aspect and outcome of the research process seemed central to me.

This contrasts heavily with the post-structural debates that I am constantly aware of now. I have always supported the idea of being reflective of your work and looking at it critically. Though I never had any idea how far these arguments had been carried out. The ideas of post-structuralists such as Foucault as well as some Anthropologists that have rejected anything moderately resembling postitivism or even post-positvism are in some sense offensive to me. This is because many hold themselves as well as others to an impossible standard. Anything except a critical reflection on yourself is seen as either dehumanizing the social actors that you are studying or in fact furthering harm by imposing ethnocentric colonial ideas. This sort of subjectivism, for me, is more demeaning of the human character than it is empowering.

While we must always be aware of the possible harms and consequences of our research, we can't let it paralyze us. Though we must not rush blindly into action thinking that we can "save" others without taking into account their social context, we also can't stand back and let people suffer only because we fear we would inflict greater harm. How is it truly different to not do something out of apathy than it is to not do anything out of a sense of self-righteousness that stops a researcher from pursuing social change?

For me this issue has come to a head as I look around at projects that many fellow graduate students are doing. It seems that this fear influences many of their projects and they have become concerned only with reflecting critically on their methods and proving to their advisors that they are not doing anything remotely relating to a claim of truth or causation. In my view it has meant that they have lost sight of larger issues that are ever present. Issues such as hunger, war, politics, racism and crushing social inequalities are left by the wayside in an attempt to create a project free of controversy.