Researching values with qualitative methods empathy, moral boundaries and the politics of research

Researching Values with Qualitative Methods Empathy, Moral Boundaries and the Politics of Research antje BednaRek-gilland The Social Sciences Institute of the Evangelical Church in Germa

QualitatiVe Methods

Researching Values with Qualitative Methods Empathy, Moral Boundaries and the

Politics of Research

antje BednaRek-gilland

The Social Sciences Institute of the Evangelical Church in Germany

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1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

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Researching values with qualitative methods : empathy, moral boundaries and the politics of research / by antje Bednarek-gilland.

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isBn 978-1-4724-1929-3 (hardback) – isBn 978-1-4724-1930-9 (ebook) –

isBn 978-1-4724-1931-6 (epub) 1 Values 2 social sciences – Research 3 Qualitative research i title

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Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1

4 The Political Values of the Research Community 75Conclusion: How to do Value-Sensitive Fieldwork 97

Bibliography 109 Index 121

I am indebted to a number of people who assisted me during the research for and the writing of this book The initial inspiration to write it grew out

of my doctoral research at the University of Aberdeen I want to thank Andrea Anderson, Abdallah Baguma, James Camilleri and Jenny Grieve-Laing

at Aberdeen in particular for their good friendship and for sharing their experiences of growing up and living in Scotland with me Over many years, this sharing in particular has helped me to become more aware of my own values and opinions and how they relate to my experience Lesley Hunt at Lincoln University (NZ) who is a wonderful and passionate qualitative methods teacher opened my eyes to the countless possible topics which can be researched using qualitative methods The impetus coming from her was later reinforced by Chris Wright at Aberdeen – thank you both Specific support for this book project came from Markus Mühling, whose keen and critical interest has motivated

me to sharpen some of my arguments, and from Hans Joas, whose blanket espousal of qualitative research on values gave me a great boost of confidence

I also want to thank Neil Jordan at Ashgate whose support of this project was instrumental in me seeing it through

I could not have written this book without the steady and loving support

of my friends and family Jacqui, Roxi, Jasmin and Verena – your belief in me and my work means more to me than I can say My husband David Andrew Gilland has read the entire manuscript and engaged me in critical discussions

of many of the finer points in the argument, for which I am infinitely grateful, all the more so since my working on this book really cut into our time together Lastly I want to thank my PhD supervisor and friend Debra Gimlin who has nurtured me over many years with her intelligent and kind presence Debra laid the seed of trust in my abilities and this gave me the courage to tackle interesting and challenging topics such as how we might be able to study values using qualitative methods I dedicate the book to her The shortcomings of and mistakes in the manuscript are of course mine and mine alone

Values are ‘back on the sociological menu’ The editors of a special issue of

Current Sociology (March 2011) on the topic of values and culture claim that

‘interest in values and moral concern is growing’ (Bachika and Schulz, 2011,

p 107) A range of publications in the Sociology of Morality (Honneth, 2007; Hitlin and Vaisey, 2010b; Sayer, 2005; Lamont, 1992; Lamont, 2010; Sayer, 2011) give further evidence to this development Partly responsible for the resurgence

of interest in the sociological study of values is that values are ‘part of the common-sense culture in which everyone lives’ (Wuthnow, 2008, p 339) and that this ‘common-sense culture’ is increasingly assuming centre stage in British and American Sociology of Culture (Inglis, 2005; Alexander, 2003) Another reason could lie in the fact that since the 1960s, western capitalist societies have undergone dramatic cultural shifts entailing changed value-based outlooks

of large swathes of the population which have attracted scholarly curiosity (Klages, 1988; Inglehart, 1977) A loss of values or the ‘weakening of their binding force’ (Joas, 2000, p 4) has been noted and piqued interest as to their causes (e.g Bellah et al., 1996; Putnam, 2000) At the same time, scholars in the sociology and philosophy of emotions have begun to inquire into the seemingly rather close ties between values and emotions (Flam, 2002; Landweer, 2009; Nussbaum, 2013) Speaking of values in sociology, then, puts one in pretty good company

But it is not so simple to speak of values as a qualitative sociologist To the

contrary; qualitative sociologists usually have very little to say on the topic A few years ago, after I had just finished giving a paper on my all-but completed PhD thesis which looked at the role of values in Conservative politics and which was based on ethnographic fieldwork, I was told by the professor who chaired the session: ‘If I were you, I would get rid of the term ‘values’ altogether This

is such an outdated topic Could you not speak about attitudes or preferences instead?’ A few months later I passed my final oral examination and was allowed

to submit my thesis to the university library and archives without any further corrections Who was right: the professor who told me to get rid of values

or the examiners who had read my entire work on values and approved of it? I wanted to believe in the second team but was quite shaken by the strong rejection of my work at face value (no pun intended), i.e simply because it focused on values I could not understand what it was with this concept which repulsed not only this one scholar, but others too (as I discovered by and by) Values are part of the staple diet of social scientists, after all They are one third

of that much-used triad ‘values, beliefs and attitudes’ which we like to employ so often when we describe research populations and cultures But trying to come

to terms with others’ rejection to the sociological study of values I realised that even after some years of working on and with values I was not able to say, on the spot and in a convincing manner, what precisely the differences are between values, beliefs and attitudes and why it does make a difference to speak of values

This was the point when I became interested in and intrigued about values, in what we mean when we use the term and what it means conceptually in the social sciences

Some time passed and further discussions with sociologists, philosophers and theologians convinced me that the tension between my two formative experiences, one positive, one negative, disguises a general problem between the social sciences and the humanities The world of knowledge and the associated fields of knowledge production can roughly be separated into those scholars who embrace the fact–value distinction and those who don’t Many of those who believe that facts and values can be analytically separated from one

another work in the natural sciences and in the social sciences, whereas many

of those who reject the possibility of disentanglement of facts from values work in the arts and humanities The social scientific study of values which is mostly carried out in political science or political sociology measures the degree

of commitment to a preconceived value (such as gender equality, social justice, etc.) It is premised on a positivistic, modernist framework whereby, under the influence of specific social and material influences, certain value commitments are formed as civilisation advances Ronald Inglehart’s work is paradigmatic for this (Inglehart, 1977; Inglehart, 1990; Inglehart and Norris, 2003) This kind of values research treats values as facts which exist in correlation to certain social and political structures In contradistinction to this, I believed that values could

be studied not as facts but as values, meaning I did not think that they are mere indicators of something else

I had chosen a qualitative design for my doctoral study and wanted to see how values are spoken of, how individuals explain to themselves and others the origin of their values and in which ways their values relate to those of the political organisation they are part of Knowing that some of the explanations

we use in our daily work are ‘nothing-but’ explanations – as in ‘his being Conservative is nothing but an expression of his class position’ or ‘her believing

in gender equality is nothing but a form of penis envy’ – and by this token are rather reductionistic, I had set out to find out what values mean to people I also wanted to find out which of our explanations, at close inspection, are nothing-but explanations, and I pursued both goals with qualitative methods, in this case with participant observation and semi-structured interviews

This was something new, for values, even in the recent renaissance in the sociology of values, are not studied using qualitative methods It not being

done, however, does not mean that it cannot be done I believe that we can study

values using a variety of qualitative research methods Qualitative research means pursuing a topic with the goal to gather as much material as possible on the thoughts, feelings, motivations, opinions and attitudes of those who have daily experience with it and to then attempt to reconstruct people’s meanings with the help of the material Such reconstructive research does not only help

us understand the specific setting and group under study, but also wider social structures and processes

Studies carried out over a longer period of time and in close proximity with the research participants are usually referred to as ‘ethnographic’ or fieldwork studies They are common across the social sciences, particularly so

in anthropology, sociology and cultural studies A plethora of different kinds

of material can be collected during fieldwork stays; in fact, there is little material which cannot be collected and used in qualitative research; how much sense collecting specific kinds of materials makes always depends on the specific research question at hand Due to the openness of qualitative methods, I tend to believe that they are the best antidote we have against reductionistic knowledge production The richness of the material we collect would allow us

in most instances to give complex answers to the questions which concern us.Even so, when it comes to qualitative values research, there is no established

procedure of how to do it, and I therefore struggled when I plunged into my research on values As it was a rewarding experience and interesting research project anyway, I decided to think through the project conceptually so as to understand better how qualitative values research might be done properly This

is the question I am focusing on in this book In my public research activities

up to now I have not had the chance to address the many instances in which the concepts I wanted to use to make sense of my data and the procedures I read about as being part of carrying out fieldwork evinced an obvious lack of fit to what I experienced myself during my fieldwork on values I never spoke about my doubts to anyone because I was only dimly aware of having them In the end, I was inspired to dig deeper into values by the silenced incongruities which I felt had marked my research experience and the odd reaction to values-

related research by other scholars, and this book is the final result of my mining activities Other qualitative researchers working on values may encounter similar incongruities as I did in the course of my work, or struggle with some of the issues I struggled with for example in regards to empathy, moral boundaries and political values during the fieldwork This book will hopefully be a helpful little companion for these fieldworkers

My overall argument is twofold Firstly and almost as a prerequisite to values studies, we as sociologists need to take emotional and moral concerns into account in how we conceive of our tasks, theorise about our methods and conduct fieldwork Sociology needs to become a more ethical discipline

This is not a new point; Zygmunt Bauman called for attention to be paid to morality in Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman, 1989) already, and Andrew Sayer

put forward a brilliant argument for an ethical social science in his Why Things Matter to People (Sayer, 2011) I see many connections between these demands

and the possibilities which qualitative research methods grant us My second argumentative point is, therefore, that qualitative values research can be one step towards sensitising our work to ethical perspectives

The argument of this book proceeds from theoretical to practical matters

I commence the discussion in Chapter 1 by looking at how values have been defined in the social sciences so far, and I then construct a definition of values which takes into account philosophical and ethical arguments and works well

in qualitative research settings I define values as those states of being which matter to us and which we care about transsituatively and transsubjectively I explain precisely what I mean by that in the second half of Chapter 1 Having thus set the scene conceptually, Chapters 2, 3 and 4 deal with specific issues which I think may be perceived as stumbling blocks to studying values with qualitative methods These issues revolve around our understanding of the role

of empathy and Verstehen in qualitative research (Chapter 2), the influence of

moral boundaries on how we conceptualise research projects and carry out fieldwork (Chapter 3) and the importance of political values in qualitative research (Chapter 4) Whilst I am predominantly arguing for the possibility of qualitative values research, the conceptual issues which I discuss in relation to this very practice-focused programme will hopefully be found useful for novice and seasoned fieldworkers alike, and for scholars with research interests which are only distally related to values as such

What I am formulating in this book is a proposal for a research programme which, in order to meet its self-declared goal to study values using qualitative methods, would have to clarify some other issues first We need conceptual clarity on important epistemological terms such as empathy, understanding/

Verstehen, rapport or partisanship, and we also need a more solid connection

between the concepts we use to describe qualitative research and the practices

we employ in the course of it This applies generally and not only in relation to values research In other words, there are ways in which our current research practice could be improved, be it through slight changes in procedures or simply through a more cogent way of arguing for specific approaches The chosen method for improvement which I found useful is trying to find a way

to become aware of some of those aspects which we normally take for granted and examine them thoroughly This is what I do in the following pages

Values in the Social Sciences

Values are an integral part of our everyday lives Most people would admit that values are important to them and that having values is valuable in and of itself (cf Wuthnow, 2008) Yet at the same time, values are abstract things which it

is difficult to talk about with any degree of specificity (Hechter, 1992) Not many people can, when prompted, instantly provide a list of the values they themselves hold And yet, when some of our cherished values are at stake,

we know it instantly and we rise to the challenge Some people place central importance on some values, e.g moral values or political values For some, their values form the basis of who they are in their own eyes, for others values subjectively don’t matter as much as does good behaviour or the ‘right attitude’ Notwithstanding this diversity, provided we would find a way to become aware

of our values, the list each one of us would compile might not necessarily mark

us out from our peers In vital respects, our lists would be quite similar: honesty, openness, patience, kindness, diligence, ambition, courage, justice – these and similar values or virtues would most likely appear on all our lists

Values, valued character traits and moral virtues are terms which seem to refer to the same things a lot of the time, and all of these we usually have a hard time becoming aware of In part, this is because in everyday life, a range

of values or things that are valuable play a role simultaneously, so it is not easy

to tell exactly which values are involved in specific situations Furthermore, the term ‘values’ is used in a variety of ways, so when talking about values, regardless of substantive differences (e.g I value honesty a bit less highly than

my neighbour because I realise that it is necessary to lie sometimes), what I think of as values may be slightly different from what the next person considers values to be Values are often bunched up with evaluations and judgements, too The values we have impact quite strongly on how we evaluate other people’s actions and, in fact, in how we evaluate their values Speaking of values, then,

can be related to personal and social identity issues, to the ethical and moral sphere, and values can relate to ideas, actions, persons and groups

The main task of this chapter is to navigate through this multi-faceted arena

in such a way that we come out with a workable definition of what values are and of how we might conceivably study them as qualitative fieldworkers.1 In

1 A note on terminology: I use the terms ‘qualitative researcher’ and ‘fieldworker’ interchangeably When I speak of ‘scholars’ or ‘researchers’ I tend to also mean those

the first part of the chapter I proceed with a brief overview of the history of the concept of values which will summarise how values can be and have been thought about by social scientists up to this point A point of especial interest

is the origin of our values which I will look at in some more detail Concluding that experience plays a vital role in the formation of values, I then move on to develop an understanding of what kinds of experiences it is that we value and why that this so This will take us into the ‘world of concern’ I then propose that values are the things that matter to people (1) in specific situations as well

as transsituatively and (2) personally as well as socially, or transsubjectively

In the second part of the chapter I discuss qualitative research methods in relation to values I start the discussion here with a reflection on the notion

of value-freedom and the role of values in qualitative research as it tends to

be practiced today I am mostly focusing on sociological qualitative research

in the UK as this is the field I know best, albeit many of the points I raise will also apply to research practice in other parts of the English-speaking world

My starting point here is the question what it is we might mean by Verstehen,

which is a crucial concept in qualitative research I then argue that the main problem we as qualitative researchers have with values is that we embrace the notion that full understanding is only possible on the basis of enormous value congruence between the researcher and the researched This makes it difficult

to study values as such, and in the open-minded manner required of qualitative research in particular

The Concept of Values in Sociology

Trying to understand what values are inevitably leads into the philosophical discourse on the topic Values are predominantly a topic of ethics, i.e of that branch of philosophy which inquires into good or bad action, and of axiology which is the philosophical discipline which explicitly deals with questions

of values.2 Philosophers, generally speaking, ‘seek to justify and criticise the judgments we make when faced with moral issues They debate with one another, at different levels, about the question: what is the right way to reach correct or objective or the best-justified moral judgments’ (Lukes, 2010, p 549)

who work empirically but I don’t specify this in every instance ‘Qualitative research’ to

me tends to be ethnographic research involving fieldwork of longer duration which is why I like the term ‘fieldworker’

2 From Greek, ‘axios’ = ‘worthy’, ‘logos’ = ‘science’

Depending on how open these kinds of debates are to actual action and social facts, they are more or less adaptable for sociological debates.3

The origin of the concept of value

The core idea of the concept of values has always been this: that they relate to

‘the good’ In philosophy, ‘the good’ denotes goodness itself as a transcendental quality of things, i.e a quality which does not lie in or emanate from the material qualities of the thing under investigation It is therefore called a ‘transcendental’

‘The good’ is one of three transcendentals, the remaining two being ‘the true’ and ‘the beautiful’

In pre-Enlightenment philosophy, the good was part of all being without, however, becoming depleted in being as such It could not be ‘used up’, as

it were, as there is always an excess of goodness which could not even be comprehended by humans In this conception the good coincides with the other two transcendentals in God’s creation This connection can best be understood

in this sentence: Being is divinely given, beautiful and true, and because God intends it to be this way it is also good The way things ought to be, so this pre-

modern conception goes, can be known simply from observing and learning what things are like right now This is what is meant when philosophers say that

an Ought derives from an Is Ontology and epistemology are conflated in this philosophical tradition

Following the Enlightenment, disillusionment with religion and its concomitant championing of rationality in science, the ontological and epistemological unity between the true, the good and the beautiful began to dissolve The new path to knowledge lay in scientific experiments and their empirical observation As for an empiricist it is quite clear that not all being

is good, the connection between the good and being in particular came under heavy attack By the middle of the nineteenth century, it had crumbled away entirely Being was then thought the subject matter of ontology (‘theory of being’), and its exclusive ‘data’ were observable facts Yet considering society and social processes, the idea of the uncircumventable origin and purpose,

or ‘telos’ in Greek, of all being which had previously been so strong was not surrendered completely straight away Instead, the divine source (God) was replaced by another source which seemed to be able to provide transcendental order as if by an ‘invisible hand’, and this other source was the market

3 I can recommend two texts which I found very helpful since they bridge the chasm between philosophy and sociology: Andrew Sayer’s Why Things Matter to People

(2011) and, for a briefer and more focused introduction pertaining to values, Davydova and Sharrock (2003) on the fact/value distinction in the social sciences

In the nineteenth century, the term ‘market’ was used in a more encompassing manner than we use it today and referred to the various interchanges and ordered relationships between people It was generally thought at the time that markets provide order, and since order has always been connected with the idea of beauty and therefore truth markets were thought to be good (Vobruba,

2009, pp 23–4) In other words, the connection between Is (how things were) and Ought (how they should be) was maintained in market relationships The term ‘value’, appropriated from the new discipline of economics in the early nineteenth century, came to express this novel, non-empirical connection to the good Things were no longer ‘good’, they were ‘of value’ or possessed a specific value to someone The concept of values, then, emerged right at the transition from pre-modernity to modernity

From the perspective of modern science, the good was by and by perceived

as removed and unempirical, as making its presence felt in irrational judgements and irrelevant personal evaluations (Schnädelbach, 1983, pp 219–22) Two consequences of this dissociation between being and the good were: the insight that values are held by individuals each in their own way, i.e the subjectivisation

of values (Joas, 2000), and the fact–value distinction which is at the root of the modern conception of social science Values are thereby considered as both distinct and distinguishable from facts and opposed to reason In the modernist version of science, this delegitimises values as factors playing a role

in science (True) facts are the desirables scientists are after, and they are to be discovered by scholar-explorers through the use of experiment and observation (Jovanović, 2011) Consequently, values are to be avoided as those irrelevances which contaminate the purity of the scientific endeavour

In the social sciences, Max Weber in particular is credited (albeit falsely) with having created the expectation that value-freedom is an especial characteristic

of scientificity, and this reading of Weber, promulgated by Talcott Parsons among others (Spates, 1983), is partially to be held accountable for the dearth

of sociological scholarship on values But not only sociologists dropped the subject for a long time; there are philosophers, too, who regard every mentioning

of values with the suspicion that an ideological agenda of some kind is being pushed (e.g Schnädelbach, 1983) or who believe that speaking of values is a sign of misguided thinking because what we actually mean or should mean when we say ‘values’ are our preferences, attitudes or desires

This points us to an interesting question: Leaving aside scholars’ quibbles about the meaning of the term ‘values’ for a moment, what do lay people mean

when they speak of values? For sociologists who use qualitative methods

to study values, this question might easily lead to people’s lay subjectivity, suggesting that we might ask people about their values, interpret what they say and build up an understanding of what they are in this way In order for this

to work, however, we still need to have a rough understanding of what we are

looking for in what people tell us The notion that values are connected to the good or to ideas of what is desirable has been used by anthropologists around Talcott Parsons (e.g Kluckhohn, 1951) and by Parsons himself (Parsons and Shils, 1951) It is one of the things which we might now look for in what people are saying Our guiding question then might be ‘what constitutes the good for people?’ Another question which I think tends to be very helpful when I try to understand something is ‘where and how did it start?’ Where do values come from, or how do we come to hold the values we hold?

The social origin of values4

It should be clear, first of all, that we don’t create values ourselves Notions

of what is considered good, be it in terms of moral character or how we act towards our fellow humans, i.e ethics, usually precede us in our culture at large Indeed, we could go as far as saying that ‘I can have the feeling that “X is good” only if have the feeling simultaneously that the other man [sic] should feel and think in the same way’ (Boudon, 2013, p 10) In other words, values are inherently relational or social constructs Asking how values arise is therefore always the question for how a specific individual came by their values rather than how values generally come into being

In the following section I want to first focus on what I believe are the most common threads in how we tend to theorise the origin of values Violently condensing several theories I summarise the axiomatic beliefs they share

as follows:

• that values are adopted because they fulfil a useful psycho-social function

• that values are passively inculcated during primary socialisation

• that once inculcated, value orientations cannot change

As I will point out, values are commonly spoken of as being determined and fixed by certain factors and circumstances The vital impact which experiential life has on the formation of new values and the transformation of old ones

4 The diversity of explanations concerning the origin of values is truly fascinating, and for those who would like to read more on this I can recommend two key texts Hans Joas’ The Genesis of Values (2000) provides a superb overview of a wide array of

both classical as well as contemporary theories Joas, who is a neopragmatist, offers a theory of values which accords action a central place Raymond Boudon, in his Origin

of Values (2013), focuses on the often misunderstood role of rational thought in how

we adopt values This is helpful as Boudon deconstructs the philosophical grounding

of the fact–value distinction

is rarely taken into account This is a shortcoming which I will subsequently address and develop further.

Values are adopted because they fulfil a useful psycho-social function The basic

conception for all sociological or quasi-sociological theories of values is that we are social beings who are embedded in social groups on whose acceptance we depend to no small degree Some conceptions present the genesis of values as

a response to group life There are two versions of this, and a common thrust

in both is that similarities in how people live result in the same values because people are subject to the same psychological influences

In the first version we have the values we have because we belong to a specific group or class Values are tied to material and cultural factors which group members are equally exposed to and seemingly respond to in a similar fashion (Abramson and Inglehart, 1995; Inglehart and Norris, 2003) For everyone in these groups/classes having the same set of values fulfils the same psycho-social function (e.g of appeasement or in terms of justifying modes

of existence) The lower classes rejecting decorum, propriety and achievement values, for instance, can be viewed as a response to their socio-economic position What they are actually rejecting are the values of the upper classes whose status and wealth they envy, and the oppositional values they embrace allow them to express their anger towards the upper classes (Nietzsche, 2013 [1887]) The values we have bind us to the group we belong to, and although we might identify a transcendental source to our values (e.g God), by believing in and fighting for our values we ultimately preserve the social conditions we are currently living in (Durkheim, 2012 [1912]) This is, in fact, the main function

of values (Parsons and Shils, 1951)

In the second version the focus is on individual actors who are depicted as desiring their values to be congruent with the values of their main reference group because it fulfils a desire for cognitive orderliness (Kluckhohn, 1951; Parsons and Shils, 1951) This tendency grows the stronger the more they aim

to climb up the hierarchy existing within specific fields within the reference group for which it is necessary to display the values of the group as one’s own (Bourdieu, 1984; Bourdieu, 1996; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1979) The basic assumption here is that conformity to group values is prized Value systems, as they are reproduced perpetually, are therefore largely stable and calculable, and any kind of unintended (i.e unpredicted or unpredictable) consequences are considered ‘malfunctions’

Values are passively inculcated during primary socialisation As children grow up,

they by and by are socialised to behave like members of their society, and adopting specific values is part of that The family setting is the foremost place

in which primary socialisation takes place It is characterised to a large degree

by routine and habitual processes, so we cannot pinpoint particularly significant parental actions when it comes to imparting values Myriad reprimands,

expressed expectations, acts of coaxing, praising and behaving lovingly or coldly towards the child form part of the primary socialising influences in the family Primary socialisation truly is ‘performed within the family from the earliest days of life’ (Bourdieu, 1984, p 59), its influence being imperceptibly inscribed in the offspring generation Regardless of our own intentions on the topic, our parents’ values make an imprint on our own values When reflected upon at a later point, e.g in adolescence, our values are experienced as natural, objective givens.

This notion of the origin of values occurring passively is very widespread

In it, values are simply part of the cultural capital that children internalize from their parents (Gecas, 2008, p 347) ‘without that process appearing in what we term consciousness’ (Mead, 1934, p 193) Saying that values are ‘adopted’ is therefore technically wrong: rather, they are assimilated passively without the individual having any choice in the matter (Joas, 2000, p 5) It is not the case that a value-object is first perceived, then reflected upon, the concomitant value-feeling emerging in the process.5 Instead, it is always already there

Once inculcated, value orientations cannot change As primary socialisation is a

form of ‘imperceptible learning’ that is ‘total’ in its effect on the individual, its influence cannot be overruled (Bourdieu, 1984, p 59) The values we adopt as

we grow up form lasting dispositions which we cannot rid ourselves of even if

we wanted to because, say, some of the values are, upon reflection, detrimental

to reaching some of the goals we set for ourselves Embracing the value of openness without discernment, for instance, can be a career obstacle in highly competitive environments in which colleagues use information against one another In this particular setting, we might by and by learn to be less chatty and trusting but we ultimately would not value openness any less in principle – because value commitments don’t change The process of value acquisition through socialisation is therefore often described as irreversible.6 A person who has been nurtured to glorify acts of violence, for example, cannot be

‘re-socialised’ except through extensive and costly therapy; entire societies, e.g conflict societies, however, cannot be re-socialised Values are not under our control This conviction also underpins most of the research that, directly or indirectly, illuminates the intersection between culture and values (e.g Klatch, 1999; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1979; Bourdieu, 1984)

5 This argument could partially be sustained with reference to anthropological research Like the majority of animals we know, ‘humans probably have a propensity

to learn preferentially from their parents, and so moral precepts are passed down the generations’ (Hinde, 2007, p 22) But this doesn’t exhaust everything there is to say about the origin of values

6 Particularly so by critical theorists

We know that values are lasting and comparatively firm (and quite abstract)

dispositions; this is what distinguishes them from (mere) attitudes which refer

to specific objects or persons and are thus subject to fluctuations much more than values are (Maio et al., 2003) However, this does not mean that we need

to be worried about there not being a chance for ‘re-socialisation’, i.e of change of values After all, it is not the case that values, much like a script, force the individual to certain actions This is where we need to distinguish values from norms Norms usually formulate prescriptions, as in ‘thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife’ As social sanctions follow from violating norms, this normative commandment does represent a script whereas the value

of faithfulness does not.7 Faithfulness is a lot more general and abstract than

‘thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife’ and, although being a principle which might guide one in certain situations, it does not suggest explicit actions Because values are important for us at a higher level of generality they don’t come with instructions for use It often appears as if this was the main reason why behavioural scientists experience high degrees of frustration when trying

to theoretically model the role of values in social life

It is important to recognise that feeling states and values are closely connected, and it is equally important to note that there is a biological foundation to having values We might call this a ‘species sense of values’, as the philosopher Max Scheler did (Joas, 2000), or we might simply observe that we are beings who are capable of valuing and evaluating (Sayer, 2011) These notions are fundamental building blocks for my own definition of values which I lay out more fully below What irks me in the above summary of how values arise is that the anthropological convictions which undergird so many theories of values don’t take heed of the fact that:

• Not many things we do stem from conscious calculations, be it a benefit calculation or one of a different kind, undertaken for our psychological benefit or other reasons.8

cost-• At the same time, we are not exclusively passive recipients of cultural influences, values being one of them

7 This is not to say that faithfulness to one’s marital spouse is not a norm The

general expectation is, I believe, that spouses are faithful to one another When they are not, however, they are no longer shunned by their community as Hester Prynne was in Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The Scarlett Letter, and it is in this sense that I would not regard

it as a norm

8 Boudon (2003) refutes this notion masterfully and with respect to how we can think of rationality in a more practise-focused way

• The material conditions pertaining during childhood do have an influence on the kinds of values we will possess as adults but they don’t determine them.

• There is always potential for change – of values, too – through creative action

The individual’s subjective point of view is missing from the above account, value formation therefore either being reduced to a universally obtaining rational principle (as in ‘these values serve the interest of all individuals belonging to population x’) or a kind of osmotic process in which cultural or group values are automatically absorbed once and for all by the passive individual-as-sponge Both versions describe processes from the spectator’s objective point of view and thus ignore the experiencer’s subjective point of view For qualitative researchers wishing to reconstruct people’s subjectivities, this is often irksome

as there seems to be a large chunk of relevant material missing Reading the literature on values I, for one, often wonder: ‘What do the individual value-holders have to say on this? Would they agree with this analysis?’

I believe that, first of all, it makes sense to think of values from the point of view of the individual actor Individual lay people can justifiably be considered experts on the values they hold, on how they came by them and on how and at what times their values play especially important roles in everyday life This is true even though lay people cannot use the language of philosophy to describe values in the ‘right’ way; they use the ordinary language of experience which

we all know The task of the researcher is to collect material which elaborates themes that are likely to involve values and evaluation Secondly, individual actors are statistically more likely to be ordinary, non-academic lay persons, and

it is therefore apposite to try and understand values in a way which does justice

to lay rather than intellectual normativity (Sayer, 2011) Albeit the scholarly account often describes lay people as going about their lives unthinkingly and largely passively, implying that there might be groups of people who function according to completely different rules and who are, as a result, a lot more active and reflective (scholars and intellectuals?), it predominantly is the case that life is constituted through actions, some of which are habitual and others which are creative and require reflection People generally try to go about their everyday lives successfully, which means in this context that the habits and routines of everyday life remain intact and working This applies universally, i.e to scholars and lay people alike Creativity is ‘forced’ in situations in which habitual action is insufficient (Joas, 1996) Such situations represent specific action-related problems which disrupt the normal way of life

Most of the time, and rather imperceptibly too, we simply aim to live a good life, i.e what we consider good under normal circumstances We know what

is good not predominantly from cultural absorption as in the sponge model,

although absorption undoubtedly also occurs, but from first-hand experience, past as well as present These experiences form part of our (cognitive) memory and they are also inscribed in our bodies as we remember which experiences enhanced our well-being and which did not We therefore form values rationally and for a reason but that reason is not an abstract calculation (Boudon, 2003); rather, it is an insight gained through experience, just like ‘someone who has known both respect and disrespect and the hurt caused by the latter may come

to believe that being respectful matters a great deal’ (Sayer, 2011, p 26) I could not think that being treated respectfully is only desirable for me personally whilst other people may well be treated abominably for no particular reason

I would tend to think that respect is a value for everyone because it would be better if that were the case, and the starting point to this is that I know it to be better from my own experience In other words, experience is the main agent in the genesis of values (James, 1961 [1902]) From our individual perspective, ‘the object which should be desired (valued), does not descend out of the a priori blue nor descend as an imperative from a moral Mount Sinai’ (Dewey, 1966 [1939], p 32) It ‘descends from’ and emerges out of experience

This is a largely action-focused, pragmatist position Hans Joas (2000) who approaches the origin of values from a pragmatist perspective argues that the kinds of situations which lend themselves to value formation usually affect the experiencer in such a way that she learns something new about herself This is the first major insight Joas states on the subject The second insight

is that experiences which give rise to values entail a matter of import which transcends the self, i.e which is either important to other people as well or which transgresses the boundaries of our physical one-ness.9 Combining these basic insights Joas proposes that ‘values arise in experiences of self-formation and self-transcendence’ (Joas, 2000, p 1) This definition suggests focusing empirical inquiries into value formation on two specific kinds of experiences

The World of Concern

Saying that values arise out of experience only works on the back of assuming that, qua being humans, we care about the content of experiences This is something we know to be true; due to our passional natures we care about what happens to us and to others Experience does not only entail action on the part of the experiencer, or ‘doings’, it also entails physical and mental suffering Experience is ‘an affair of facilitations and checks, of being sustained and

9 Both ecstatic moments such as Durkheim’s (2012 [1912]) ‘collective effervescence’

as well as acts of extreme violence can be counted as experiences which permeate the boundaries of the self (Joas, 2003)

disrupted, being let alone, being helped and troubled, of good fortune and defeat ‘ (Dewey, 2011 [1917], p 115) Whether a situation confronts us with one side or the other in the above binary pairs is not a matter of indifference to us

We suffer when we are troubled and in need of help which is not forthcoming, and we bodily and embodiedly know the sting of defeat when we expected good fortune This is what I mean when I say that we care about the kinds of experiences we make due to our passional natures

Suffering and defeat indelibly belong to our lives Coming up against obstacles in how we carry out action time and time again impresses upon us our fragility and vulnerability opposite the world Thus, we may not be able to satisfy even our most basic needs or act on what we think would be the best course of action in a given situation, and whenever either happens we realise that, qua being human, we are needy and dependent creatures (Sayer, 2011,

pp 139–42) What we consider the good cannot be attained 100 per cent of the time, and whether or not we attain the good matters to us It makes a qualitative difference to our lives as we feel the absence of the good in a negative way Our relation to the world is therefore primarily one of concern

Saying that values arise in specific situations and that we are concerned about realising them could be interpreted as meaning that each and every one

of us has their own values and that values, furthermore, are best understood when operating with the assumption that human beings are inherently individualistic animals This is not what I mean First of all, if we believe that even our innermost psychological core, our self, is socially constituted,

as George Herbert Mead (1934) argues, then most individualistic explanations always seem strangely aberrant It simply does not make sense to speak of our concerns as an exclusively individual or personal matter when the very way we cognitively conceive of our being depends on others But we are also inherently dependent animals in a very practical way since for most of our plans to come

to fruition we need the help of others in some shape or form And there is yet another way in which our concerns are not individual matters: they are self-transcendent insofar as we care for things other than ourselves, and they are social insofar as other people, institutional boundaries and material constraints can prevent our flourishing (Nussbaum and Sen, 1993) From the perspective

of the state, for instance, taking the wellbeing of individual persons seriously would mean creating the structures which would allow everyone to unfold their capabilities through being able to develop practical reason, establish relationships with other people, obtain an education, express emotions, etc (Nussbaum, 2011)

When I say that we are all of us equally vulnerable and needy I don’t mean that everyone is vulnerable in exactly the same way Some vulnerabilities are universal, of course; everyone is equally concerned about their bodily integrity and wants to be ‘secure against violent assaults, including sexual assault and

domestic violence’ (Nussbaum, 2011, p 33), and we would likewise assume that most people are concerned about having a measure of control over their direct environment (ibid., p 34) Vulnerabilities are also highly subjective, however When I think of being vulnerable, I first of all think of it in terms of the things which have happened to me alone, the experiences which I have not been able to avoid, the mistakes which I unwittingly made, and the current problems I face in achieving certain valuable ends or in confronting specific problematic situations (cf Landweer, 2009) Although it is true that we are generally vulnerable beings,

we have to also bear in mind that we become aware of this in specific situations and for specific reasons in which we are not immediately able to cater for our own needs This realisation in and of itself is accompanied by the stinging sense

of how defenceless and powerless we often are Our needs and whether they are met is a constant matter of concern for us

This ‘needs-based conception of social being’ (Sayer, 2011, p 139) goes somewhat toward explaining why we value and evaluate at all (in brief, because

we care); albeit that we do is an anthropological fact It is also clear that we always

do both at once We care about reaching certain goals which are important to

us, about being enabled and enabling others to develop in appreciable ways, about how we are treated by others and about how we treat others ourselves

We want to flourish and avoid suffering, and in order to know which is which

we need to evaluate. 10 Evaluation, in short, is the other side of the value coin

It is on-going and never-ending, for everything that has meaning to us cannot

be thought of as devoid of values (Louch, 1969) From the perspective of one who studies values it therefore does not make sense to talk about abstaining from evaluative expressions or judgement Neither can truly be achieved

Emotions and values

Values directly relate to our concerns Concern here means an interest in bringing about states of being which we care about, which we are invested in

or have an interest in, or which we feel strongly about (Dewey, 1966 [1939]; Frankfurt, 1982; Nussbaum, 2001) Valuing is therefore always connected with desiring that which we have through experience come to appreciate as something that matters to us The kind of desire that is involved is one that is practically reasonable, meaning it relates to our embodied knowledge of what constitutes well-being for us

Emotions are an integral aspect of our passional being Emotions register

at a basic dispositional level of our existence and relate to our experiences of

10 At least normally we do; Robert Dunn (2006) cautions against assuming a strict determinism here, however, since what he calls ‘pathologies of the heart’ can always deter us from actively pursuing our values

well-being; they are therefore ‘not the subject’s thoughts about their experience,

or the language of self-explanation arising from the experience, but that immediate contact with the world the self has through involvement’ (Barbalet,

2002, p 1) Emotions connect us to the world, and emotional reactions, at times strong and passionate ones, are always in the offing when we are confronted with things we care about We could say therefore that ‘the act of valuing is […] emotional; it is the conscious expression of an interest, a motor-effective attitude’ (Dewey, 1966 [1939], p 5)

Viewed in this way and always keeping in mind that we are interested in how

to study values using qualitative methods, we could say that emotions serve

as indicators of values Instances during interviews or in interactive processes among several research participants which are marked by shock, shame, embarrassment, fear and other emotions thus deserve especial interest as they serve as a guide to values (Landweer, 2009)

Two further comments are in order concerning the connection between values and emotions They refer to justification and irrationality Firstly, since the good has become a good for us through experience, and since the memory

of that experience is inscribed in our bodies, we tend to feel justified in feeling the way we do in situations in which things which we are concerned about are

at stake To a large extent, we cannot feel any other way than justified about our values because they partly constitute our own sense of identity (Frankfurt, 1982; Joas, 2000) This means that doubting our own values is truly difficult However, this is not to say, secondly, that value feelings escape rational self-reflection because they are mostly irrational To the contrary, emotional responses may make us aware of something not being quite right in the situation at hand,

or the self-feeling of strong emotions could serve as an important piece of information to us For instance, feeling tears well up upon hearing a good friend state that she fears that the friendship might be crumbling may drive home to myself the fact that I care very much for this friend In other words, the emotional response tells me that I care.11 Considering both these points in tandem suggests that simple rational argument usually is incapable of affecting

a change in values; something more akin to a pastoral conversation, in contrast, might take an affect

11 This example resembles the James-Lange theory of emotion in which the order

in which emotional response and feeling occur are reversed Instead of ‘I am sad, therefore I cry’, this theory proclaims that ‘I cry, I notice that I am crying, I reflect on why this is so, and then I feel sad’ It was first laid out in William James’ Principles of Psychology (1890).

Defining values

What we need is a value concept which places primacy on experiences of the good which individual people make In this regard, what I propose here is vastly different from the commonplace sociological account which I laid out above and according to which values correspond to our interests and are absorbed through socialisation (‘human-as-sponge model’) Notwithstanding the crucial influence of material and social factors on values, the commonplace account sees people as essentially passive By virtue of this approach, experiences would ‘come upon’ people who must then deal with them In contrast to this

I suggest that values are formed in situations which possess a fundamentally transformative quality in that they further self-transformation and self-transcendence (Joas, 2000) These situations tend to be ones in which we come up against obstacles which we have to actively and creatively overcome Obstacles can be many things both banal or holistically horrific, and anything

in between Repeatedly missing the train to work and therefore often being late, for example, exemplifies the first category of banal obstacles In time, the commuter in question, constantly being met with her colleagues’ disapproval, would either have to learn to appreciate punctuality somewhat more, or she would have to find ways to renegotiate the nature of her work commitments

so as to avoid such problems The category of horrific obstacles is exemplified

by experiences of war and violence which change people in deeply traumatic ways (Joas, 2003) Obstacles, or crises, involve the experiencer in ways in which everyday experiences don’t They pierce the boundaries of the self and they open the self to the world and to other people (Joas, 2003) In that sense value formation is a social process

Our values are usually deeply important for who we are, for ‘a person who cares about something is, as it were, invested in it He [sic] identifies with what he cares about in the sense that he makes himself vulnerable to losses and susceptible to benefits depending upon whether what he cares about is diminished or enhanced’ (Frankfurt, 1982, p 260) In other words, we are never neutral towards the things we care about We feel strongly about these things, and ‘the fact that someone cares about a certain thing is [therefore] constituted

by a complex set of cognitive, affective and volitional dispositions’ (ibid., p 262).Over time, the stock of experiences we have made leads to the building up

of a stock of tried-and-tested – and therefore subjectively justified – ideas as to how the good might be attained and how life might best be lived These practical ideas are our values They form the basis of how we evaluate social processes Andrew Sayer thus defines values as ‘“sedimented” valuations that have become attitudes or dispositions, which we come to regard as justified’ (Sayer, 2011,

p 25) Implicit in the notion of justification is that we care about whether others care about the things we care about (Frankfurt, 1982) Drawing on Joas’

work I would add to this that values are things that matter to us transsituatively (in specific situations as well as beyond the specificity of any one situation) and transsubjectively (not only for myself, but also for others) Honesty, courage, justice and other values do not just make a difference in rare situations or for singular individuals; they constitute ideas as to how social life should transpire and as such may have a significant role in how people act Whether they do have that role and in which specific situations they become important factors

is, however, an empirical question In the remainder of the chapter I turn to qualitative research methods so as to gauge how these empirical questions could

be dealt with when it comes to studying values

Studying Experience with Qualitative Methods

Experience is an empirical matter: it can be spoken about by the experiencer herself and it can be observed by others From the vantage point of an empirical researcher this means that we can produce two different accounts

of experience, one based on narration and the other on observation Those aspects of our being which matter to us transsituatively and transcendentally will always play a role in our narrations of our experiences, and depending on how we design our research it can be more or less likely that these two accounts explicitly dwell on experiences which gave rise to values, too

Specific to qualitative fieldworkers is the perspective on the lives of individual persons and their subjectivities, i.e their very own and, in many ways, unique experiences of and in the world surrounding them (which is often referred to

as the ‘life-world’) An inquiry into, say, the practices involved in workplace

‘fiddling’ and ‘pilfering’ (Ditton, 1977), in competitive debating (Fine, 2001)

or in couples’ everyday quarrels (Kaufmann, 2009), or a study of those who undergo cosmetic surgery (Gimlin, 2012), insofar as it is a qualitative inquiry, would focus on narrated experience with and in these subject areas and on observation of relevant aspects, and it would build up knowledge on these topics on the basis of both No matter what the specific focus of a qualitative inquiry is, people’s feelings, values and judgments always play a role in their actions and stories

The main idea underlying qualitative research is to go to the group of people

we have identified as potential research participants and to start interacting with them ‘in their natural environment’ Experimental settings are rejected in favour

of the ‘normal’ life-world which surrounds individuals Epistemologically, this draws on the phenomenological insight that we need to learn to see things

as they truly are, which requires a ‘natural attitude’ (Ferguson, 2006), and as they appear to the people under study As a type of inquiry, qualitative social

research is therefore referred to as ‘naturalistic inquiry’ John Brewer explains what this means in the following manner:

Naturalism is an orientation concerned with the study of social life in real, naturally occurring settings; the experiencing, observing, describing, understanding and analysing of the features of social life in concrete situations as they occur independent of scientific manipulation The focus on natural situations leads to this orientation being described as ‘naturalism’, and it is signified by attention to what human beings feel, perceive, think and do in natural situations that are not experimentally contrived or controlled (Brewer, 2000, p 33)

Thus, fieldworkers who spend extensive periods ‘in the field’, getting to know the research participants quite well in the process, have myriad opportunities to learn which elements of social structures, specific circumstances or processes are relevant to people and why they are relevant Since people interpret the social world in light of their biographies, relations and specific situational contexts, their ‘relevance structures’, which is a term which the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz (e.g Schutz, 1982) has coined, cannot be known unless people’s subjective meanings are known Interpretation is always necessary for there to

be meaning in social life, and it is the meanings which individuals endow their life-world with which are of interest to qualitative fieldworkers (Brewer, 2000,

p 34)

Qualitative inquiry in the 21st century departs from the Enlightenment model of science whose main methods were observation and experimentation These two methods were seen to provide safe paths to scientific knowledge

‘Observation was used as a means to turn away from theological and speculative views It was a kind of “public way” of attaining certainty’ (Jovanović, 2011,

p 11) By the natural science model, the world is knowable outside human agency and external to it; ‘social life is perceived to comprise objective structures independent of the people concerned, and to consist of wholes and systems that go beyond the consciousness of individuals’ (Brewer, 2000, p 30) Researchers working in this tradition look for an objective ‘truth’ and the ‘laws’ that govern society, and would subsequently pay ‘little attention to the inner lives, the thoughts and feelings, of people (their subjectivity)’ (Filmer et al.,

1998, p 25)

But observation and experimentation are not the best means of attaining knowledge in all subject areas There are questions, important and relevant questions, which simply cannot be answered using these methods Most prominently, these questions concern the interpretation of historical events Establishing what historical events mean requires completely different methods

in which hermeneutics, i.e diverse methods of interpretation, must play a

prominent role A completely different paradigm is required here, as Christopher Bryant (1985) explains:

The natural world is, at least so far as science is concerned, a meaningless given

By contrast the human world is a meaningful construction: society and history are informed by, or obtain their form from, human ideas, values and purposes There is thus a division within the sciences between the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and the human sciences, the sciences of the mind or of the

spirit (Geisteswissenschaften) Furthermore the inherent differences in the objects

of the two groups of sciences determine corresponding differences in their methods The natural sciences attend to external relations and seek to explain natural phenomena in terms of causal laws The human sciences attend to internal relations and seek to understand (verstehen) human phenomena by relating them

to the ideas, values and purposes which give rise to them (Bryant, 1985, p 65)

The arguments made for ‘the human sciences’ are highly relevant for those studying social processes of massive change Key innovations in hermeneutics which became basic convictions for sociologists were that human beings are connected to the world around them through constant on-going interpretative loops and that scholars who wish to comprehend social processes need to themselves develop interpretive tools with which to gauge the content of interpretive processes The received methods were not able to furnish these tools The main subject area for interpretive social research as we know it today is the study of human experience (Denzin, 1989) The German word Verstehen

is used in English to refer to the specific kind of interpretive understanding required of the hermeneutician That it should be this German word which

is used in the English-speaking academic world has as much to do with the fact that the earliest debates on epistemology and method were waged between German-speaking scholars in Vienna and Berlin at the beginning of the 20thcentury (Bryant, 1985) The notion that neither of the equivalent English verbs

‘to comprehend’ or ‘to understand’ quite capture the idea of deep accord, or holistic understanding on two different levels, which the German verb Verstehen

expresses, is a legacy of those debates Its usage is usually associated with Max Weber’s definition of sociology and the role of values in the social sciences since this is a source most sociologists come across as part of their basic introduction into the discipline

Value-freedom in the social sciences

The question of values and their place in interpretive processes is a crucial one

It does not arise as such in the natural sciences as they consider their subject

to be external to the person of the researcher and ‘facts’ to be objectively true

in relation to her Values therefore don’t matter in natural science contexts

It is different in the social sciences (which, in the nineteenth century, were subsumed in the category ‘human sciences’) where the researcher is instrumental

in interpreting the ‘facts’ That there are several ways to exercise this part of the professional role became obvious for the first time at the beginning of the twentieth century when a group of German political economists raised eyebrows for their politically biased way of lecturing Max Weber, who had also trained as a political economist, objected to this quite strongly, most prominently in his essay Science as Vocation (Weber, 1958 [1919]), and cautioned

against lecturers acting as if they were politicians:

To take a practical political stand is one thing, and to analyse political structures and party positions is another When speaking in a political meeting about democracy, one does not hide one’s personal standpoint; indeed, to come out clearly and take a stand is one’s damned duty The words one uses in such a meeting are not meant as scientific analysis but means of canvassing votes and winning over others They are not plowshares to loosen the soil of contemplative thought; they are the swords of enemies; they are weapons It would be an outrage, however, to use words in this fashion in a lecture or in a lecture-room […] The true teacher will beware of imposing from the platform any political position upon the student, whether it is expressed or suggested ‘To let the facts speak for themselves’ is the most unfair way of putting over a political position

to the student (Weber, 1958 [1919], pp 145–6)

The task of the scholar the way it is set out here was not to impose specific interpretations on students but to acquaint them with basic facts and structures of meaning (Bedeutungszusammenhang) At the bottom of this was

an ethics of responsibility which obliges lecturers not to take from students the responsibility of making up their own minds about the meaning of the facts that they are acquainted with by lecturers (Scott, 1995) Although Weber acknowledged the inherently ethical nature of those activities which commonly constitute a scholar’s life-world, his belief that scholars need to ‘recognize the implications and limitations of the tasks I, as a scientist, politician, etc., undertake’ (Scott, 1995, p 78) led him to propose a separation of the processes constituting hermeneutical analysis into two stages: in the first one, the ‘facts’ should be ascertained and ordered, whilst in the second one, which is the actual interpretation, draws on our pre-existing knowledge, cultural schemas and values In other words, the ethical way of being a scholar according to Weber

is to keep values out of some processes which make up our work and to only allow them to play a role in a small number of distinct other processes

Positivist scholars instrumentalised Weber’s statements on the role of values for their own purposes, proclaiming value-neutrality in the sciences in Weber’s

name (Bryant, 1985; Scott, 1995) In American sociology, Alvin Gouldner’s discussions of Weber’s work on objectivity in social research (Gouldner, 1973a) unintentionally ‘established’ this kind of reading of Weber The ‘myth of value-free sociology’ (Gouldner, 1973a) is easily rejected, however In the late 1960s, Gouldner and Howard Becker (1967) were engaged in a fruitful debate on the impossibility of abstaining from value judgement in the course of research, Becker arguing for partisan research and Gouldner advocating different ways

in which one could honour one’s professional role by practicing restraint when

it comes to evaluation and judgement (Gouldner, 1973b) However, both agreed – and this is the general consensus on the topic – that the researcher’s values, in one way or another, undoubtedly impact on the course of research and consequently on the results produced through it

It is a truth universally acknowledged that researchers view the problem under research from a particular standpoint and that their findings can therefore only be considered more or less plausible considering the context in which the research is embedded ‘I am interested in researching x because x is important to me’ is where the debate on the role of values especially in qualitative research is usually at This cannot be all there is to say on values, but we seem to be lacking concepts as well as a language to say more For example, ethical concerns – and I don’t mean research-ethical concerns but ‘how to live life well’-ethical concerns – on the part of the researcher play an important role It is easy to see that for researchers, even if they try to abstract from their specific biographical and fieldwork situation because they think that is the right thing to do qua their role as researchers, ‘some conception of flourishing is unavoidable’ (Sayer, 2009,

p 777, original emphasis) Researchers hold such conceptions as regards their research participants and their life-world, and this means that some outcomes

of e.g fieldwork activities will always be considered ‘better’ or more valuable than others One could go as far as saying that we, qua species sense, perceive morally (Louch, 2000 [1966]) and that researchers, who also perceive morally, therefore always bring to their work notions of the good which do not as such ‘arise’ from the ‘mere facts’ they assemble (Sayer, 2009) And this is ok as

‘mere description’ is impossible; ‘in observing and diagnosing human problems what we observe is productive or destructive, industrious or lazy, brave or cowardly behaviour These are value judgements, to be sure, but they are also descriptive’ (Louch, 2000 [1966], pp 82–3).12 Facts and values merge, and values are therefore always integral to the research process Rather than striving for

12 Not all observation protocols are evaluatively tinged in the way Louch suggests,

as there are, of course, ways to render the content of observation using rather neutral language The ability to deliver neutral observation protocols is not a ‘natural’ one, however, but needs to be acquired through careful and prolonged instruction and practise

value-freedom qualitative researchers aim for practicing reflexivity throughout the research which entails including a reflexive account of how it transpired (Bednarek-Gilland, forthcoming).

Reflexivity and values

Reflexivity in qualitative research results from the effort to become aware of our values and their role in the research That doing reflexivity is not easy has been expressed by various researchers (Bishop and Shepherd, 2011; Bott, 2010; Daley, 2010; D’Cruz et al., 2007; Finlay, 2002; Mauthner and Doucet, 2003; Ward and Jones, 1999) For example, Natasha Mauthner who had researched mothers suffering from postnatal depression, trying to remain aware of her own views (as a then childless researcher) on the topic throughout, only realised much later and in conversation with a research group that her account had been biased from the start The research group ‘pointed out that her interpretation

of the women’s accounts was premised on a negative conceptualisation of motherhood and by the loss and bereavement model of motherhood informing much of the feminist literature she had been reading’ (Mauthner and Doucet,

2003, p 419) Even though Mauthner had tried to become reflexively aware of her

subjective views on the topic she had simply not been aware of this undercurrent

in her thought Karen Lumsden (2012), in writing about her research on racers, repeatedly refers to her ‘beliefs and values’ which she tried to always be aware of which is a welcome attempt at reflexivity Lumsden does not, however, state what precisely her values were On the one hand, both these cases (and there are many more) demonstrate that the willingness to be reflexive does not immediately bear fruit and that, on the other hand, there are several ways in which we can be reflexive

boy-In any case, it would benefit the practice of qualitative research if the researcher was able to refer cogently to her values, i.e to the things that matter

to her transsituatively and transcendentally, and explain, at length, if necessary, how they relate to the topic of research The primary aim of qualitative research

is, after all, to reach a ‘deep understanding’ (Verstehen) of the phenomenon

under inquiry from the point of view of those involved in it, and this includes the researcher In other words, without including the researcher’s perspective in the research account, it remains fundamentally incomplete

Interpretation and Verstehen

One central premise of interpretive sociology is that ‘interpretation or understanding is the fundamental way that human beings participate in the world’ (Schwandt, 1997, p 174) All experience is ‘a process of active interpretation of the world in which it finds itself and which forms its arena’

(Ferguson, 2006, p 75) The task of the qualitative researcher is to reconstruct the research participants’ active interpretations, i.e meanings, as well as their own How precisely this reconstruction takes place often remains a mystery It is one thing to say that Verstehen plays a crucial role in it and quite another matter

to practice Verstehen, or to even know what constitutes it Let us therefore have

a look at the concept of Verstehen and what it entails.

Verstehen is a two-part process It is partly attained through empathetic

fellow-feeling and partly ‘gained through conscious reflection on the expressions

of others’ (Makkreel, 1975, p 253) Weber, in his definition of the task of sociology, relied on both meanings of Verstehen: on the one hand, ‘empathetic

or appreciative accuracy is attained when, through sympathetic participation,

we can adequately grasp the emotional context in which an action took place’ (Weber, 1978 [1921/22], p 5) Weber speaks of empathic understanding

as ‘a psychological technique: a matter of putting oneself in the other fellow’s position’ (Winch, 2008, p 105), i.e through fellow-feeling (Sayer, 2011,

pp 118–9) On the other hand there is the ‘direct observational understanding

of the subjective meaning of a given act as such, including verbal utterances’ (Weber, 1978 [1921/22], p 8) which truly means ‘I see it and I understand it without needing to imagine myself being in the situation of the other’

Weber’s example for a situation in which direct understanding takes place

is when we agree, which we normally would, that 2 × 2 = 4 Here, grasping

an intention or motivation is irrelevant, whereas most social situations, e.g when watching several persons engaged in team sports only make sense when we know the rules of the game they are playing In those situations, knowing actors’ motivations is the vital step towards understanding Culture

plays an important role for interpretation, too, insofar as actors and observers possess an interpretive frame which is shaped by the cultural and temporal context in which they are located and which frames both parties’ interpretations

In actual social interactions direct observational and empathic understanding often coincides, which means that it can be rather difficult to separate them analytically For the sake of illustration, consider this example: ‘A student in

my office reaches for a cigarette and matches, he strikes a match and lights the cigarette, inhales and exhales the smoke’ (Louch, 2000 [1966], p 23) Written

in 1966, this describes a scene which was probably quite common back then Direct observational understanding immediately occurs on the part of the author, and what the writer observes and describes therefore requires no further commentary (‘It would not occur to me to accompany this set of observations

of his actions with further comments designed to explain what he did’ (ibid.)) But empathic understanding may also be required if we feel that knowing that the student came in and lit up does not tell us the whole story Whilst direct observational understanding gives a descriptive account of what is happening,

empathic understanding means that the observer forms an idea as to why the

student reaches for a cigarette in this particular situation Let us assume there are further clues such as shaking hands, a general desperate demeanour, and let

us further assume that both the student and the professor know that the student has only just failed an important exam These important pieces of information transcend direct observation and would aide enormously in imagining what the student feels like and why he might need a cigarette And this kind of information allows us to establish empathic understanding Louch does not mention any of these additional circumstances, neither does he ask what the student’s motivation for smoking is, or was (thus, in my interpretation at least, completely normalising this situation, making it unremarkable) However, that

is probably what a qualitative fieldworker might want to know, for we attempt to reconstruct people’s subjective meanings and the social and cultural structures

in which they are embedded

With both sets of knowledges, direct observational and indirect empathic knowledge available, Verstehen is attained easily Many conditions have to be met

for this to be possible, however Firstly, we need a lot of context information Secondly, the researcher needs to possess some kind of ethical sensitivity in order to gauge the feeling state of the research participant, or in order to be aware, first of all, that there is something to gauge here If all of this is given, then we might feel that understanding, or Verstehen, indeed transpires easily

Louch’s position was that our interpretation is already ‘implied in the ways

we observe and describe behaviour’ (Louch, 2000 [1966], p 23) This would mean, contra Weber, that we cannot separate our values from ‘the facts’, not even when we intend to Understanding is achieved when we capture the meaning

of an action including the motivation for it from the point of view of the actor, and our

understanding of what ‘normally’ happens when people turn up with a soccer ball in hand or when they reach for lighter and cigarette helps Being acquainted with local notions of normalcy is key, and we need to bear in mind that normalcy

is subject to cultural shifts Thus, even without knowing the date of publication

of Louch’s book (which was 1966), we would tend to temporally place the above anecdote at some point before smoking was widely defined (and thereby

‘became’) unhealthy and banned from public areas Interpretive efforts, in other words, cannot dispense with historical and cultural context

Verstehen in the fieldwork process: the role of emotions

Understanding on the part of researchers involves the same two interpretive processes as all other understanding In other words, empathy as well as rational direct understanding are integral to the research process, both related to

experiences made by and with the research participants In order to grasp what social practices mean to research participants, we as qualitative fieldworkers therefore tend to take time, in fieldtrips of longer duration, to learn to operate

with approximately the same set of interpretive tools which the research participants already possess Another way to express succinctly what happens during fieldwork is to say that fieldwork nativises us, i.e that it helps us form conceptual tools similar to those which the ‘natives’ of the field under study possess This is particularly the case when, at the onset of the research which started with identifying a theoretical or societal concern which affects many but can only be investigated in a small setting, we know very little about the groups at the centre of the study As the fieldwork unfolds, we learn about the (historical, social, political and cultural) context, or the ‘arena’ in which most

of their research participants’ actions occur, and we also learn about research participants’ specific kinds of rationalities or thought patterns by participating

in their lives, talking to them extensively or doing whatever else the structure

of the field allows us to do as appropriate ways of being in the field Thus we can later on construct a ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973) of the phenomenon under study, i.e one that reflects agents’ (or insiders’) subjective view on the phenomenon whilst simultaneously explaining it and its context to outsiders.Whilst, qua being practitioners in an academic discipline, qualitative sociologist-researchers share many assumptions with other scientists, our work

is in many ways ‘at odds with scientific canons’ (Kleinman and Copp, 1993,

p 3) Our task brings us close to the people we study and this makes it harder

to remain detached than it would be in other disciplines or when carrying out survey research (Kleinman and Copp, 1993; Bishop and Shepherd, 2011) Yet

to conceive of our role as that of an impartial and detached spectator still is the normative expectation in mainstream sociology (Sayer, 2011) Qualitative fieldworkers therefore face a constant battle between, on the one hand, being rational, detached and scholarly and, on the other hand, being personal-emotional beings who establish relationships of mutual respect with research participants rather than treating them in an aloof manner as mere ‘informants’

It is particularly difficult to come to terms with this ambivalence at the beginning of our careers when we have not found a stable modus operandi yet which suits our personalities and research needs and is at the same time acceptable in the eyes of our academic peers Many express uncertainty about how close they can get to their research participants Albeit in theory, since the postmodern turn, we no longer believe in a stark differentiation between facts and values or rationality and emotions, in practice it is still difficult and not always de rigueur to put ourselves in the research (Clarke, 2005) Uncertainty arises concerning emotional states in particular, i.e questions such as whether it

is appropriate to be upset when the research participants are upset or whether

it would be better to try ‘really hard’ to hold back our emotional responses,

be they tears or anger, until after the interview is over (Dickson-Swift et al.,

2009, p 65)

These are challenging issues to face On the one hand, they are related to moral questions which address genuine ethical and research-ethical concerns

in relation to the research participants and research procedures as a whole On the other hand, however, these issues signal procedural ambiguity in regards

to our professional role in the field as well as in the research community As fieldworkers, we cannot really be sure about how close we can justifiably – considering that we are scholars – become to our interviewees Vested notions

of what constitutes ‘good research’, moral boundaries and political standpoints delimit the possibility of genuine openness in terms of research design, relations to research participants and interactions with our academic peers, and these factors affect the way we conduct and report our research As a result, the immediacy and normalcy of relating ethically and emotionally to our research participants often disappears in the writing-up process of our research (Ellis and Bochner, 1996, pp 19–27)

Values in the Research Process

I faced precisely these problems during my fieldwork with young Scottish Conservatives, and I had to find a practical solution for myself I read early on into my work that ‘if you are not “on their side”, then you cannot fully understand why they do what they do’ (Kleinman, 1991, p 192) This was a simple solution

to my ‘values problem’ as it suggested clearly that, as a fieldworker, I could not have met the goals of my research if I had not tried to take the young Conservatives’ perspective So, notwithstanding the fact that I thereby, for all intents and purposes, would become close with a group who was, at the time, considered beyond the moral pale by most Scots, I tried to do precisely that And I learned in the process that taking the research participants’ perspective is, after all, not the same as unequivocally affirming that what everything they do is

‘right’ in every possible way; it simply means being on their side for the duration of the fieldwork Martyn Hammersley (2008) calls this internal attitude ‘commitment

to appreciation’ of the research participants It is a stance which is indelibly infused with the norm to show respect to those who open up to us and who make our work possible by granting access to their life-worlds and life stories.Unfortunately, appreciation seems to be meted out in rather restrictive fashion: firstly, to research participants who allow us to affirm our own and our discipline’s values and, secondly, to researchers whose values are identical with those of the research participants and the community at large At a time

of funding cuts, empirical research is increasingly subjected to career-related motives and political concerns (Brewer, 2013), and our values play an enormous role in that On the one hand, this politicises research to a large degree, turning sociology into an ‘underlabourer’ of specific (party) political positions On the

other hand, strong prior value commitments on the part of the researcher which are unquestioningly accepted as either beneficial givens or practical necessities make it almost impossible to study other people’s values in an open-minded manner These are genuine obstacles to the study of values by the means of qualitative methods.

Problems with studying values

How to do qualitative values research will hopefully become clearer as I work through some of the problems which I think values research currently faces I will sketch them out briefly now Some of the construction sites blocking access

to values research are associated with our definition and the limits of Verstehen,

others with a lack of reflexivity or with political pressures Verstehen seems to

uncritically be defined by the degree of empathy which the researcher is able

to feel for the research participants Developing empathy towards the research participants has become an aim of qualitative research, and as researchers cannot be empathic towards any and every group there is, certain groups will not be empirically investigated The best argument for defending this position is that a lack of empathy makes full understanding, i.e direct observational as well

as empathetic understanding, impossible But what do we mean by empathy? And what is the practical relation between empathising and doing research? These questions are at the bottom of what I call ‘the empathy problem’ which

I tackle in Chapter 2

Secondly, and closely related to the empathy problem, is the issue of moral boundaries (Chapter 3) Much of qualitative research remains within rather narrow moral boundaries determined by received notions of what progressive-minded researchers should be researching As critical reflection on the moral value commitments of qualitative researchers occurs only rarely, these moral boundaries have become cemented over time I want to describe what they are, how they are being defended and how they impede reflexive qualitative values research This discussion also touches on the interesting issue of the moral purpose of research

The third problem I see is the strong preponderance of ‘underdog’ research Quite in line with the disciplinary heritage in anthropology and sociology, qualitative researchers mostly study problems and groups whom they can hope to help in some way The fixation on ‘underdogs’ leaves problematic issues worthy of scholarly inquiry among groups who cannot be construed as underdogs unilluminated Does this mean that we only focus on one part of the social world? Chapter 4 is dedicated to this topic and related concerns regarding the politics of research

I presented a few reasons for why sociological qualitative research should, in future, become more attuned to the ethical dimension of everyday life This is important in view of how we relate to and understand our research participants, but it is also important in view of our own profession We as fieldworkers also relate to the world primarily as beings who care, who emote and who have concerns The expectation that we may be able to remain detached despite studying people on very close quarters is entirely misplaced We never do, and

if it seems that we do then it is just because we misrepresent our fieldwork when we write about it Researchers, beside being scholars, white-collar workers and so on, are also ordinary people who live in a world of concern Whereas this way of talking about human beings is rather common among ethicists and philosophers, it is rather unusual in sociology Both philosophical and sociological sensitivities are needed when we are dealing with values, for whilst philosophers tend to present under-socialised accounts of values, sociologists tend to think of them in a way that overlooks our valuing, ethical natures (Sayer, 2011) Sociologists working on values thus need to develop ethical sensitivities which go further than the commonplace avoidance of harm and bring them to bear on their research practice, and this, I think, is not as easy as it may seem The following chapters address some of the difficulties we face when doing qualitative values research

Empathy, Verstehen and Values

Doing qualitative research well means interacting as a researcher with the research participants in such a way that what we, in the end, think are their subjective views of their life-world largely represents participants’ practical experience and knowledge on the matter dressed in a different garb For us as fieldworkers to

be in a position to collect material (through observation or interviewing, etc.)

on the participants’ views, we need to interact with them on a relatively close personal level and for a longer period of time The biggest challenge in this tends to be to find a balance between relations with the research participants which we, on the one hand, consider sufficiently close and, on the other hand, to maintain a ‘scholarly stance’ of relative detachment For connected with different degrees of closeness are different degrees of reliability; among ethnographers, the general rule of thumb is that the closer the relationship between fieldworker and researched, the richer the data and the more reliable and robust the findings Much therefore hangs on how the fieldwork transpires and which roles fieldworkers manage to negotiate for themselves in the field.Emotions have a key role in the many different processes which are involved

in fieldwork An intricate aspect of embodying the role of the professional social researcher is to deal with the emotions which arise in the course of fieldwork Empathy and the ability to be empathic are key in this It is one of the emotional acts which are mentioned most frequently in this connection Empathy helps build rapport, and an empathic relation to or with the research participants is also often treated as the sine qua non for obtaining reliable material There is also

a research-ethical aspect to empathy: since empathy revolves around the notion

of equality based on shared characteristics between interactants it is viewed

as a safeguard against objectivist and imposing top-down scholarship On the whole, when qualitative researchers speak of empathy they thereby express their commitment to personalised, embodied and empowering research Empathy, then, in qualitative research as in our everyday usage of the term, is obviously

‘a good thing’

Nonetheless, there are quite a few open questions concerning empathy For instance, accepting that empathy is very important, what are the practices associated with it? Do we mean by empathic understanding something innate which everybody does and which occurs more or less spontaneously or is empathic understanding a skill which we can acquire and hone in the name of empirical research? And what kind of knowledge do we gain through empathic