Toward a Methodological Stance

Final paper for Approaches To Qualitative Inquiry with Colleen Larson

Section 1: Reflections on Received View of Research

I was raised by two medical researchers and a former astrophysicist, surrounded by stacks of quantitative journals. I rarely questioned the assumption that quantitative empirical research is the gold standard of truth, and that while subjective accounts are interesting and illuminating, they are not ultimately reliable. From scientists I learned that stories belong to mythology, while facts do not necessarily organize themselves in ways that can be apprehended so easily. Creation myths tell the story of a human-scale world in which humans are the most important element. Astrophysicists tell us that the universe is unfathomably vast and incomprehensibly old, and that we are insignificant in the grand scheme of things, while evolution teaches that we are more like mushrooms or daisies than unlike them. It is axiomatic for scientists that reality is empirically knowable, and while social and emotional considerations are a fact of life, they are noise to be filtered out.

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Research proposal – Hip-Hop Pedagogy

Final paper for Principles of Empirical Research with Catherine Voulgarides

Research questions

Jamie Ehrenfeld is a colleague of mine in the NYU Music Experience Design Lab. She graduated from NYU’s music education program, and now teaches music at Eagle Academy in Brownsville. Like many members of the lab, she straddles musical worlds, bringing her training in classical voice to her work mentoring rappers and R&B singers. We often talk about our own music learning experiences. In one such discussion, Jamie remarked: “I got a music degree without ever writing a song” (personal communication, April 29 2017). Across her secondary and undergraduate training, she had no opportunity to engage with the creative processes behind popular music. Her experience is hardly unusual. There is a wide and growing divide behind the culture of school music and the culture of music generally. Music educators are steeped in the habitus of classical music, at a time when our culture is increasingly defined by the music of the African diaspora: hip-hop, R&B, electronic dance music, and rock.  Continue reading

The Long Shadow

Note-taking for Principles of Empirical Research with Catherine Voulgarides

Alexander, K.L., Entwisle, D.R., & Olson, L. (2014) The Long Shadow: Family Background Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

The Long Shadow

The central message of The Long Shadow is that social mobility in America is a myth. The authors combine objectivist and subjectivist epistemologies, using a theoretical perspective combining postpositivism implicit in their statistical analyses with some interpretivism shown by their use of first-person narratives. The methodology centers around a longitudinal study of 790 first graders tracked over 20 years via regular interviews. This data is extensively supplemented by other statistical measures. Periodically the authors quote interviews with a particular subject to put a human face on a particular statistical theme. Their procedure is transformative and concurrent, with individual perspectives and broader statistical trends mutually informing one another. The authors aim to show that underprivileged Baltimore residents show little social mobility, but that the reasons for their lack of mobility are complex, multifaceted and intersectional.

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Marked

Note-taking for Principles of Empirical Research with Catherine Voulgarides

Pager, Devah. (2007). MARKED: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Page 21 of Pager’s book includes this chart, showing annual prison admissions for drugs by race in the United States. In the 1980s, we imprisoned roughly the same numbers of black and white people for drugs. There are about six times as many white people as black people in the population generally, so unless you believe that black people do drugs at six times the rate white people do, there would appear to have been some racism at work.

Pager 2007 p 21

Then in the late 80s, there was an incredible jump in the number of black prisoners, leading to the present situation, where there are between two and three times as many black people in prison for drugs as white people. While America has become less racist in some respects, this statistic tells us that we are not making as much progress as we like to imagine. These facts also have implications for the history of hip-hop. You can see the rise of both gangsta and overtly socially conscious rap in large part as a response to the devastating effect of this sentencing disparity.

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Ain’t No Makin’ It

Assignment for Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry with Colleen Larson

If you’re looking for a gripping and highly readable (though depressing) sociological study, I strongly recommend this one.

Ain't No Makin' It

The purpose of MacLeod’s study is to understand how class inequality reproduces itself, using the example of two groups of young men living in a housing project. He asks how these young people reconcile America’s dominant ideology of individual achievement, where success is based on merit, and economic inequality is due to differences in ambition and ability, with the reality of the participants’ own limited choices and opportunities. In particular, MacLeod addresses the question of whether education ensures equality of opportunity as it is purported to do.

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Ideological and Theoretical Assumptions

Note-taking for Principles of Empirical Research with Catherine Voulgarides

Special Ed

Artiles, A. J. (2011). Toward an Interdisciplinary Understanding of Educational Equity and Difference: The Case of the Racialization of Ability. Educational Researcher, 40(9), 431-445.

Artiles explains how a civil rights victory for learners with disabilities has become a way to oppress racial minority students. He cites statistics showing that African Americans are more than twice as likely as their white peers to be diagnosed with intellectual disability and one and a half times as likely to be diagnosed with emotional or behavioral disturbance. Other minority groups are similarly over-represented. After kids get placed in special education, their academic outcomes are usually bad, and their economic prospects are correspondingly limited. Even within the disabled population, white students tend to do better than their minority peers. While poor kids are likelier to be diagnosed with disabilities, race is a significant predictor of diagnosis even if you control for poverty.

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Objectivity, Positivism, and Epistemological Others

Note-taking for Principles of Empirical Research with Catherine Voulgarides

Weber, Max. [1904](1949). “Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy,” In The Methodology of the Social Sciences, Max Weber, translated and edited by Edward Shils and Henry A. Finch. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Pages 49-112.

Max Weber - The Methodology of the Social Sciences

Sociology arose in order to make value judgments about measures of state economic policy. For Weber, though, an empirical science can’t provide binding norms and ideals that you can use to immediately derive policy from. “An empirical science cannot tell anyone what he should do—but rather what he can do—and under certain circumstances—what he wishes to do.” Social science can attain objectivity only by keeping out the researcher’s value judgments about their subjects’ goals. In the same way, economics claims objectivity because economists don’t take positions on what people are supposed to value.

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Descriptive Participant Observations on the Culture of the Park Slope Food Coop

Writing assignment for Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry with Colleen Larson

The Park Slope Coop (PSFC) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1973. It offers sustainably and ethically produced food and grocery items. Because it needs only to cover costs rather than turn a profit, the PSFC’s prices are substantially lower than a typical Brooklyn grocery store. Since its founding, it has grown from a small ad-hoc organization into a substantial neighborhood institution with over 17,000 members. Only Coop members are allowed to shop, and members are required to work a monthly two hour and forty-five minute volunteer shift. This is unusual—most food coops give members the option of paying a membership fee rather than working. The PSFC is managed by a core staff of paid employees, but members perform much of the day-to-day labor, which helps keep costs low.

Park Slope Food Coop exterior

The aisles are narrow, stacked floor to ceiling with inventory. Per the web site, the store carries “local, organic and conventionally grown produce; pasture-raised and grass-fed meat; free-range, organic and kosher poultry; fair-traded chocolate and coffee; wild and sustainably farmed fish; supplements and vitamins; imported and artisan cheese; freshly baked bread, bagels and pastries; bulk grains and spices; environmentally safe cleaning supplies, and much more.” The PSFC generates over fifty million dollars in sales revenue per year, with a “shrink rate” (merchandise lost, damaged or stolen) of about half the industry average. The environment feels markedly different from a typical grocery store. There is a conspicuous absence of candy, magazines, soda, marketing aimed at kids, and branding and marketing generally. The only periodical available is the PSFC’s own Linewaiter’s Gazette, which resembles a high school newspaper.

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