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A (careless) anthropologist among the freshmen


Submitted by spinuzzi on Thu, 08/24/2006 - 5:58am.

Over at Althouse, they're discussing an anthropologist who lived among and studied the freshmen of Northern Arizona University. Much of the discussion denigrates the insights of the study as obvious, which is too bad -- anthropology is all about studying a culture and developing more complex insights than casual observers might produce, and indications are that the anthropologist was successful in doing this. But a subset of the discussion involves the question of institutional review of the research. The anthropologist apparently studied the freshmen without informed consent (though the article is not crystal clear in this regard); her attempt to keep them anonymous failed, and now she's going on a speaking tour in which she describes the behavior of her non-anonymous non-consenting participants.

If she didn't get informed consent -- if I read the article correctly -- what a nightmare. Now let's speculate further. Suppose that some of her unwilling participants are unhappy about how she has represented them. It takes about five seconds to set up a Blogger account and an hour to tell their side of the story, complete with video clips and pictures from ever-present cellphones. They could represent themselves directly, and in doing so, represent the anthropologist, reinserting the sorts of blunders, slippages, and mistakes that anthropologists tend to edit out of their own accounts. Wouldn't that be an interesting scenario? I talk about a similar scenario in a book chapter that will be coming out soon.

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Who watches the watchers? The watched.
Submitted by tankgrrl on Thu, 08/24/2006 - 9:13am.

This reminds me of David Brin's The Transparent Society, when he argues that the "watched" should watch those who are surveilling them. It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how tenable it is in the real world. This particular case is a sticky wicket. If the anthropologist's intention was to accurately chronicle life among these students, some amount of deception may have been necessary. However, not preserving their anonymity was a bad idea. If these students had captured a bunch of the anthropologist's foibles digitally, what recourse would she have? Would this just turn into a "she said/they said" sort of Blogger match?

I'm always fascinated by the ways IRB determine what deserves informed consent. In many cases, journalists are granted far more leniency vis-a-vis these kinds of exposes. I recently read Pledged (summer fluff reading), which chronicles the lives of mostly white sorority sisters in the south. I couldn't believe the kind of access the journalist had, and the ease with which someone could have identified her participants (despite using pseudonyms). Given that any number of really damaging events were described in the book (rampant alcohol/drug abuse, eating disorders, sexual assault, etc.), I found it fascinating that the journalist decided not to report any of the "secret rituals" she observed during her sorority stays, as if discussing these would be far more harmful to participants.

I know much of this has to do with who has the power in these situations. Until now, we've assumed that researchers have much more power to shape these narratives than their participants do. However, with the advent of mobile technologies, and the ever present threat of compromising pictures/films being uploaded to Flickr and YouTube with the touch of a button, things may be equalizing somewhat. I wonder if there will be a time when IRB rules are implemented to protect the researcher as well as those who are researched.

- Adrienne Massanari
www.hegemonyrules.net

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Yes, the tables are being turned
Submitted by spinuzzi on Thu, 08/24/2006 - 11:12am.

"I wonder if there will be a time when IRB rules are implemented to protect the researcher as well as those who are researched."

Yes, I really do think so. In my upcoming chapter, I draw an analogy between qualitative research and journalism. Here's a quick cut-and-paste from that chapter:

Similarly, journalism is reaching a crisis because its means of production (from printing presses to distribution networks to journalists’ notebooks) are to some degree replicated by the combination of websites (particularly blogs), search engines, and mobile technologies. In the old model of journalism, journalists would gather information, editors would vet it according to stable disciplinary standards, and the press would print it. But that model has become destabilized because the two ends of the process turned out to be the anchors: gatekeepers could control and enforce the standards primarily because they could control the means of production (Boczkowski 2005, p.164). These two constitute the bottle that holds the genie, or (to use another metaphor) a black box, Pandora’s box (Latour 1999). As long as that black box remains closed, we assume that its contents are stable and unitary. But the box can be forced open. As we found out in Rathergate, once the means of production are distributed, anyone who has access to the new means of production can critique the old standards and introduce other standards from their own fields and disciplines. And the means of production have been so distributed that we are approaching the state that Michel Serres described in his discussion of the Greek agora:

When everyone knows everything right now about everybody and lives by this knowledge, you have antiquity's notion of freedom and the ideal city, and also the ideal of modern philosophers since Rousseau, the ideal of the media and social science, of the police and bureaucracy: poll, clarify, inform, make known, expose, report. A terrifying nightmare, one that if you've lived in small villages or large tribes, you'll want to avoid all your life, for it is the height of enslavement. Freedom begins with the ignorance I have and wish to preserve of the activities and thoughts of my neighbor, and with the relative indifference that I hope they harbor for mine, for want of information. (1995, p.68)

Qualitative researchers have held a similar monopoly on publishing and representing their participants. (And even when they try to extend rights of self-representation to the researched through participatory action research techniques such as member checks and coauthoring, it's a courtesy rather than a necessity.) That monopoly no longer exists, and even though the dam has not yet broken to my knowledge, it inevitably will, and I think it will be a very big deal.

Right now IRBs assume the traditional asymmetrical relationship between researcher and participants, and thus they layer on protections for participants, the vulnerable side of the equation. As participants start treating researchers like journalists, IRBs will have to deal with this "terrifying nightmare" by developing reciprocal protections. And researchers will have to start dealing with issues such as multiplicity and representation in earnest.

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