Been a Heavy Life: Stories of Violent Men

3. Thinking about Research Effects

3 THINKING ABOUT RESEARCH EFFECTS What social science is properly about is the human variety, which consists of all the social worlds in which men have lived, are living, and might live. —C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 1959 Even when we feel ourselves simply spectators, we are also participants. —Louise M. Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem, 1978 Are researchers ever really spectators to the activities that they study? The image of researchers on the outside looking in is prevalent in most literature on methodology for social research. But it troubled me because, trained to see the social all around me, I thought social influence should extend to my research interviews. The narrative data I “collected” should, to some extent at least, be a product of the interview and not a sole-authored work of the narrator. In this chapter I describe how I came to investigate the situated production —call it co-production—of narrative data in the research settings in which they were voiced. I then discuss various methodological approaches to research effects on data and potential problems with recognizing oneself and one’s study “in” one’s data. When “I” Entered the Study When concrete plans for this study were first laid early in 1999, I had a nonspecific interest in the self-narratives of violent men: a raw fascination with what they would say about themselves when prompted to talk about who 32 . B E E N A H E AV Y L I F E they are. I also had a desire to air their stories as something of a political act, like qualitative researchers before me (see Norum 2000; Sullivan 1998). Contemporary criminal justice processes tend to construct offenders as “less than fully human” (Harris 1991, 90). I hoped that my research would counter that construction (Delgado 1989). I would engage offenders in storytelling, that most human of activities. At a pivotal point in my analysis, I began to see the narratives as conditioned by the research interview. Review of the methodological literature brought me to fairly recent writings on reflexivity. In this literature, reflexivity implies that one’s observations are always affected by researcher characteristics and perspectives and by social processes engaged by research (see Hammersley and Atkinson 1995, 16). A reflexive scholar is one who reveals her own standpoint and often her own voice in the research. These days it is quite common to read something about the position that the researcher takes on her subject matter. Some reflexivity is demanded by contemporary scientific norms. As my analysis proceeded the ways in which the interview seemed to have “entered” the narratives became more apparent. For example, I saw that social appearances and roles were not merely setting the stage for the interview, or being talked about during the interview, or coloring the narratives by some quantifiable measure (more on this momentarily). They were, rather, under construction during the interview. The more that I followed this notion, the more my attention, and particularly my reading of the data, turned to contextual effects on the data. Glaser and Strauss (1967) refer to theoretical explanations “grounded in” one’s data. Here was a methodological turn grounded in my data. Traditional Perspectives Of the various realities that social scientists are said to have excluded from their studies (Belknap 2001; C. Gilligan 1982; A. Gordon 1997; Harding 1987; Henry and Milovanovic 1996; Richardson 1995; Ross and Richards 2002), the one I am immediately concerned with is that of the researcher as social actor. It is not the case that the social scientist has been rendered invisible in her research. Rather, the necessarily elastic, indeterminate, and evolving character of social interaction between researcher and study participant has been denied.1 Research effects (also called “reactivity”) have been conceived as phenomena that should and can be controlled (Bachman and Schutt 2001). T H I N K I N G A B O U T R E S E A R C H E F F E C T S . 33 At least three dominant approaches to research effects may be distinguished . First, naturalistic studies involve total immersion of an ethnographer in the culture of those under study. The ethnographer’s prior ideologies are supposedly eclipsed by those of her research participants (Hammersley and Atkinson 1995, 16). This process of “going native” is in fact considered a hazard of being too comfortable in the culture of...