School of Social and Political Science

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This blog introduces the Untangling Methods Controversies series with discussion of two societal challenges. I believe they are significant in shaping the questions asked by social research and how research is and ought to be done. The challenges and controversies researchers face – ethical, political, and epistemological – can be presented in a way that puts the onus on the qualities of the individual researcher. While we do each have a personal responsibility and want to be accountable, I like to think in terms of the research themselves being part of a knowledge making web or assembly of people and systems. That bigger knowledge making construct is composed of the disciplines we belong to, the personal histories that locate us in relation to our work, the methodological infrastructures of censuses, surveys and data stores, and the toolkits we use.

There are two developments which impinge on that knowledge making web. First: a lot of knowledge is made for us using systems which we can pickaback on but that have their own rules and dynamics and which are opaque in crucial ways. There are positives to that. Much effective research takes place outside of institutions, and social media platforms and discussion forums potentially provide vast quantities of data. Much of my research involves data from darknet forums for people who buy and sell illicit drugs. The challenge with that is retaining an ethnographic sensitivity to it while also applying computational methods that can trace how drug exchange processes evolve over time and understanding networks and associations of buyers and sellers.

Second: there is information fracture, which has two elements. There is political disagreement about the nature of independent evidence, and related to that is a deliberate fracturing of the open digital sphere and its devolution into separate subnets that are opaque to each other. Trust in established news sources and in governments is not strong across the board for example. How do we maintain trust in the conclusions of social research when our work is necessarily embedded in some of those same institutions?

I find myself in a double bind with this. I am naturally sceptical but also place a lot of value in shared societal trust as the only way in which the good life can be achieved. Social problems can only be solved democratically with agreement on evidence. The value of social research methods is that it produces independent evidence on the nature of society, social-economic problems and challenges, and potentially agreed ways of reaching effective solutions. That is an ideal, but as we are humans it is also limited in practice. Social research, like any other institutional practice, can be governed by agendas that are hidden or unquestioned, or partial.

One way of reworking what we do is to recognise the role of social research in the creation of an information moral economy. When people answer surveys, fill in census forms, and put up with us when we interview them or hang out in their spaces, they and we are participating in a moral economy that recognises civic commonality and the public good coming from research. The moral economy is both instrumental and emotionally bound, and recognising it means we need to understand our duties towards norms of reciprocity and the public good, and the role our work has in vital questions of the distribution of economic and social resources. Recognising the informational fracture I have outlined social research cannot be about pure information (no such thing) or uncontested knowledge (which is undesirable as anything should be contested) but creating local, critical spaces where communities can decide on the informational priorities that matter to them.

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Photo by Jilbert Ebrahimi on Unsplash