Sociology and the evidence base

Another post that I have recovered from the wreckage of the 'Great Blog Crash of 2008'

Some time ago, a colleague remarked that he hoped that, in the Institute in which I work, research would be “less critical and more evidence-based”. I’ve thought about this a great deal, partly because as time has passed, I think my work has become more, not less, critical. The idea of an ‘evidence-base’ seems to make social scientists both excited and anxious. On one hand, it promises us a place at the table. Our work can inform policy – and the more it informs policy, the more that resources and prestige seem to flow from it. On the other, it ties us to a particular kind of program of research, making evidence for policy – one that in the UK has been effectively nationalized, and tied to a set of policy imperatives. But it also ties us to a set of political processes that decouple the analysis of data (something that academics do) and its interpretation (something that policy-makers do). In the impulse to make ‘evidence’ we risk regressing to method and technique as the central scholarly problem. The more we focus on technical problems of practice, the less we focus on explanation and theory.

Evidence only works as evidence if it is engaged with explanation. This week, I’ve been relaxing and recovering from double vision, by reading Stephen Kern’s ‘Cultural History of Causality' (Princeton, 2004). Kern has a wonderful take on this problem. He examines the ways in which ideas about the causes of human behaviour have changed since the 1830s. He explores the impact of theories from the psychosocial sciences as they impact on explanations for action. The twist is that he uses examples from detective fiction to give bite to his argument. There’s a second twist, by focusing on individual acts of aberrant behaviour (mainly murder), what Kern shows, is the complexity of individual action and its integration within patterns of collective action. Kern’s analysis is an interesting and useful antidote to the grinding orthodoxy of much Foucauldian scholarship about ‘social construction’, and is also a useful reminder of the enervating and convincing patterns of explanation that arose from earlier – phenomenological – constructionist theory in the 1960s. In particular, it draws back to the work of Peter L. Berger, and the problems of how realities are constructed in practice by their participants. That is the constant engagement and interdependence of individual and societal, and – as Kern emphatically announces on the final page of his wonderful book – how little we yet know about this, and how much more we have to learn.