Social Science Space

Can ethnography, long characterized as a lower tier of evidence in studying drug use, find things other approaches miss?

Steven Lubet set out to investigate whether ethnography’s characteristic reliance on unverified accounts may sometimes produce misinformation. He argues that In any other academic discipline, his findings would have provoked less umbrage and more reinvestigation.

Fact and perception are simply different categories, neither of which is necessarily more important than the other, argues Steve Lubet. . The challenge for ethnographers lies in making clear and careful distinctions between what they have actually seen and what they have only heard about.

No matter how exquisite the details, it is important to separate fact from folklore – which should not require cross examination.

While journalism might at times be seen as a sort of ‘ethnography lite,’ when it comes to checking out the field reporter’s facts it’s much more of a heavy hitter.

Janet Salmons, the methods guru at our sister site MethodSapce, interviewed Dr. Peter Gloviczki about his use of autoethnographic methods.

New revelations about the influential ‘Being Sane in Insane Places’ experiment by David Rosenhan provide a valuable lesson for other social scientists. You never know what you will find once you begin fact-checking sources against available documentation.

Ashley Mears describes modern jet-setting club life at the VIP level and the Veblen-esque conspicuous consumption, its “ritualized squandering” in Mears words, that is its hallmark.

Burned out by the hamster-wheel of academe and the regime of metrics, John Postill decided the tonic would be to write a spoof spy thriller about a Spanish nerd with a silly name who moves to London in 1994 and accidentally foils a terrorist plot by an evil anthropologist.

In recent popular music, there have been few if any performers as enigmatic as the late Leon Redbone, who died on May 30. With a vintage repertoire featuring tunes from ragtime, blues, vaudeville, and Tin Pan Alley, and always appearing in dark glasses and a Panama hat, he looked like a figure straight out of the 1920s.

Steven Lubet, the author of ‘Interrogating Ethnography: Why Evidence Matters,’ explains the importance of his approach to investigating the discipline — to ‘put it on trial’ — and to reiterate the idea that accuracy matters in social science. Spurring on his restatement is a recent review on Social Science Space that Lubet argues missed his point entirely.

When discussing the nexus of computer science and social science, the transaction is usually in one direction – what can computer scientists do for social scientists. But a recent paper from Tufts University anthropologist Nick Seaver reverses that flow, using the tool of ethnography to interrogate the tools of engineering.