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Morality in Scientific Practice: The Relevance and Risks of Situated Scientific Knowledge in Application-Oriented Social Research

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Abstract

After decades of epistemological inquiry on the social construction of science, we have observed a renewed consensus on empiricism in application-oriented social sciences and a growing trust in evidence-based practice and decision-making. Drawing on the long-standing debate on value-ladenness, evidence and normativity in sciences, this article theoretically discusses and empirically illustrates the Life-World origins of methods in a domain of inquiry strongly characterized by an empiricist epistemic culture and a normative stance: Children and Media Studies. Adopting a reflexive approach to their own research in such an epistemologically underexplored field, the authors analyze a standard research instrument (the codebook for content analysis) and two procedures (operational definitions and intercoder agreement). The analysis illustrates how background assumptions (e.g., moral suitability) shape the research method and how the procedures routinely conceal this work of shaping. In the discussion the authors cast light on the role scientific procedures play in the naturalization of a given moral order, and put forward the question of whether and how this “morality-building” feature of methods should be taken into account in the assessment of their appropriateness. In the conclusion the authors advance that the situated nature of scientific knowledge, rather than discrediting its relevance, is what makes it relevant, here and now, for the larger community the research may impact on. The authors discuss the risks of such a pragmatic outcome and propose the adoption of an oscillating epistemic stance as a way to cope with them.

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Notes

  1. Following Kuhn (1962/1970), Longino discusses five constitutive values, i.e., criteria and standards defining what counts as acceptable scientific procedures or methods and, therefore, what counts as scientific knowledge: accuracy, scope, fruitfulness, consistency and simplicity (Longino 1990: 34f., 1996: 41–44, see the analogous concept of epistemic values, Carrier (2013).

  2. Approaches in social sciences that clearly endorsed a constructivistic perspective and claimed for the unavoidable value-saturation of knowledge claims and the constitutive role of the researcher’s culture include: feminist ethnography (Collins 1991; Naples 1996); participatory enquire paradigm (Heron and Reason 1997; Reason 1984a, b); participant comprehension perspective (Collins 1984); activist research (Speed 2006); enactive ethnography (Wacquant 2015); collaborative ethnography (Lassiter 2005). However they do not represent mainstream social science research that is still committed to empiricism. Rather, they are examples of what Longino classifies as “radical” or “oppositional science” (1990: 194–196).

  3. We adopt Carrier’s (2013) “application-oriented research” label as it appears suitable to grasp the fuzzy boundary between fundamental and applied research that is typical of many social sciences. Fundamental research describing typical human behavior, delineates—by definition—what is conforming behavior and what is not and this threshold has clear pragmatic consequences. In many social sciences, constative utterances are performative (i.e., transformative of the reality they describe) as they lead to changes in the way we act. From this standpoint, distinguishing description from prescription appears to be difficult if not misleading (Caronia 2011; Gergen 2015.) On the “looping effect” according to which psychological realities come into existence through social scientists' morally saturated classifications, frame social understanding and produce patterns of social life, see Hacking (1996, 2000), see also Woolgar and Pawluch (1985).

  4. Reflexivity in social sciences is a concept deeply investigated in two different yet related directions. “Methodological reflexivity” addresses the work of transforming the “doing of the research” into a theoretical object, i.e., something to inquire in. The second direction is “epistemic reflexivity” that addresses the issue of scientific research changing what it is supposed to account for. On the double meaning of reflexivity in fieldwork and social sciences, see among others Alvesson and Sköldberg (2009), Ashmore (1989), Lynch (2000), Woolgar (1988), Scholte (1999), Caronia (2018a).

  5. We use the term “morality” to refer to the system of canonical versions of the world and taken-for-granted assumptions concerning “what is right and what is wrong” through which we order our lives on mundane bases (Stivers et al. 2011; Galatolo and Caronia 2018). From this perspective, the concept of “morality” does not coincide with the notion of “the moral responsibilities of scientists” (Douglas 2009: 66) although—as we propose in the conclusion - the two concepts are related.

  6. In Bourdieu’s sense of the term, “arbitrariness” refers to the constituted nature of knowledge claims produced through systems of specific practices that, in turn, depend on a set of conventions (see the notion of the epistemic or constitutive values in Longino’s (1990) and Carrier’s (2013) terms). In such a sense, “arbitrariness” does not evoke independence from any norm or other constraints nor refers to unjustified knowledge claim.

  7. There is something paradoxical in claiming that application-oriented social research needs to neutralize the arbitrariness of its knowledge claims while, simultaneously, proposing a self-reflective account on this issue. This paradox indexes the specific issue at stake: it is only when the researchers step back from the epistemic culture typical of the specific academic community and readership of a given application-oriented social research and adopt different theoretical lenses, that the value-ladenness of the endeavor becomes visible.

  8. Given the debate on localization and globalization in media cultural contents and forms of entertainment, cross-cultural analyses in CMS have a long-standing tradition. Some clusters of variables recur to allow for comparison (see among others Lemish et al. 1998; Livingstone and Bovill 2001; Lemish and Götz 2017). Although cross-cultural studies found differences along categories or themes, research teams should share not only a common list of categories, but moreover, common definitions of the categories used to code the TV content (on the methodological challenge of international comparison of television content for children, see Caronia and Caron 2008).

  9. Cohen's kappa coefficient (κ) measures inter-coder agreement for qualitative (nominal) items. As it also accounts for the possibility of agreement by chance, it is considered a more sophisticated measure than simply calculating the percentage of agreement, i.e., how frequently different coders apply the same code or value to the same item.

  10. “Assessment” is an ambivalent term. We deliberately use it and draw on its fluid semantic field to evoke the blurred boundaries between what can be conceived of as mere descriptions (e.g., how many people are present) and what appear to be clearer normative based evaluations (e.g., “positive values”). Drawing a line between description and evaluation is not an easy nor unproblematic task: behind the mere “counting” there is an assessment as to the fact that the number of x is a meaningful cue of something (e.g., it is an index of some qualities of the phenomenon we are coding). In counting x we assume that inferences can be made upon the presence, absence or numerical value of that x. The same fuzziness is implied in the so-called report-formatted assessments (e.g., the character is thin or fat, happy or ugly). In a few words, description and evaluation appear to be profoundly intertwined activities. Following Goodwin and Goodwin (1987), we consider them as poles of a continuum of assessment-relevant activities.

  11. What we are illustrating about the codebook (its being a Life-World driven “system of relevance” applied to reality, Schutz (1967, 1970) can also be claimed for many other social research tools like the interview-grid, observation grid or questionnaire, see Caronia (1997, 2014, 2018b).

  12. We owe this note to an anonymous reviewer who rightly remarks that research tools and procedures encode precise epistemic stances. Insofar as the researcher uses the tools and follows the procedures, he adopts - at least locally - these stances, whether he or she acknowledges such a positioning or not and irrespectively of his or her theoretical agreement.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to Dr. Boris Brummans and Dr. Jennie Hwang (University of Montreal) for their unique support to the research endeavor this article draws upon, as well as for their comments on a previous version of it. We also wish to thank Dr. Sonia Livingstone (London School of Economics) for her invaluable suggestions on an earlier draft of this manuscript. We also wish to thanks the anonymous reviewers whose fine-grained and constructive revisions deeply contributed in sharpening the arguments. This article strongly benefitted from their readings. This article discusses some of the methods used in a large scale quantitative-qualitative inquiry titled ‘A National Study on Children’s Television Programming in Canada,’ supported by the Alliance for Children’s Television (ACT-AET) and CTVglobemedia (CTVgm) through the CTVgm/CHUM tangible benefits program.

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Caronia, L., Caron, A.H. Morality in Scientific Practice: The Relevance and Risks of Situated Scientific Knowledge in Application-Oriented Social Research. Hum Stud 42, 451–481 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-018-09491-2

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