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The Craft of Inquiry: Theories, Methods, Evidence

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In the late '70's when I was a doctoral student in education policy studies, I took a course in medical sociology as an elective. One of the items on the required reading list was Robert Alford's (1975) book Health Care Politics. Alford had done an ambitious case study of health care reform in New York City covering the past fifty years. Over the decades, from one reform endeavor to another, Alford found remarkable commonalities in the investigative approaches taken, the strengths and weaknesses found in the health care system, and prescriptions for reform.

Specifically, once a New York City administration had concluded that lack of adequate health care was a legitimate and serious problem, a commission of prominent, economically successful citizens was formed. In each instance, the commission's charge was to investigate health care resources and delivery, to identify problems, and to propose solutions. In each instance, from one commission to another, New York's health care system was found to be potentially adequate to the task of providing health care for everyone, if only it were properly organized. The notion of "coordination" of services appeared again and again in the reports of the various investigative bodies.

After reading the commission reports and investigating archival and other sources of informatiion concerning health care in New York City, Alford reached a very different conclusion. Using rudimentary but useful concepts of dominant and repressed structural interests, Alford explained difficulties in access to health care in terms of social class. The world of health care in New York City was organized so that it met the needs of affluent and socially well situated citizens, while the needs of the less fortunate were effectively suppressed.

I recall being impressed with Alford's theory-based judgemnt that New York City and its health care system were neatly structured in class terms, and that this mode of organization was effectively masked by an ideology of public administration: there was fundamentally nothing unfair or otherwise inadequate about health care in New York City; it was all just a matter of getting resources properly organized. In a very preliminary way, Alford's notions of dominant and repressed structural interests, along with an attendant sanitizing ideology, prefigured the work of the Greco-French Marxist philosopher Nicos Poulantzas.

However, when the course's instructor assigned us the task of writing a review of Health Care Politics, I was surprised and puzzled by what I produced. I liked the book and have since used Alford's basic concepts in my own work on illiteracy. My review, however, was almost entirely unfavorable, largely on methodological grounds.

Recall the time the review was written: the late '70's. Even more than today, the social sciences were suffused with an ethos of overweening positivism. In retrospect, it's embarrassing to recall that just about everything published in a creditable sociology journal had one or more regression-based path models purporting to discern causal processes that explained variation from case to case in just about every outcome measure imaginable. As a result, most of us in the medical sociology class had learned how to evaluate fairly sophisticated quantitative research, but historical case studies were something very different. Now that I have read Alford's more recent book, The Craft of Inquiry, I imagine that he anticipated this sort of response to Health Care Politics, especially among readers who were not around before the social sciences went overwhelmingly statistical.

The continuing dominance of the ethos of positivism is abundantly evident in journal articles and, to a lesser extent, books published by social scientists. However, the last three or four decades have also seen a renaissance of interest in qualitative work, especially that done by ethnographers. For example, in educational research one of the most influential works of the 20th Century was Paul Willis' book Learning to Labor, an ethnograpic account of reproduction of a tractable working class in Manchester, England.

Historical and comparative research, too, has been given renewed interest. One of the best known researchers in this tradition is Theda Skopcol, perhaps the world's foremost student of the circumstances that give rise to revolutions. Her book States and Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (1979) is widely acknowledged as a contemporary classic.

As an ironic aside, when Skopcol applied for tenure at Harvard, her application was denied. Her work, rumor had it, was judged not sufficiently scientific in a sociology department dominated by the mathematical sociologist Harrison White. Whether or not the rumor is true, Skopcol appealed Harvard's desicion on gounds of sex discrimination, and she was reinstated.

The point of all this is that Alford's text, The Craft of Inquiry, was written for a time and place in which the methodological developments illustrated above were concretely manifest in a variety of ways, and social scientists needed to be reminded that their most influential forerunners -- Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Freud -- employed a multiplicity of methods to make tenable inferences, giving their work a lasting richness and influence that otherwise would have been overwhelmed by misguided methodological self-consciousness.

In an ideal world, Alford would opt for what he calls a dialectical approach, using a multiplicity of methods, as well as diverse but complementary theoretical perspectives. Alford, however, is a realist. He knows that institutional constraints, pressures to specialize, inclinations of funding sources, and the naturally limited physical, emotional, and intellectual resources of normal people who do research militate against realization of a research program that approximates the best that could possibly be done. Nevertheless, he makes a compelling argument for openness to alternatives and against off-the-shelf, routinized approaches to research and theorizing.

The Craft of Inquiry has many virtues, but is not a conventional how-to-do-it textbook. As best I can determine, Alford's intention was not to show us how to do research, but how to do it better. As this observation suggests, the book is best used by someone who has acquired a level of maturity in a specific discipline sufficient to enable Alford's analyses of the research of greater and lesser others to strike a responsive chord. The ideal reader, I think, would be someone who has actually done research and has encountered the messy, mind-bending difficulties that force modifications in research questions, raise concerns about the adequacy of definitions of crucial concepts, make clear that available data often puts one in a the-best-I-can-do-under-the-circustances situation, and makes us wonder if we're really cut our for this sort of endeavor.

Alford emphasizes what we all know but are inclined to forget in our own work: there is no such thing as a perfect piece of research. His analysis of Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is especially interesting because Alford highlights the backing and filling, changes in direction, re-interpretations, and startling leaps of faith that Marx was forced to make in demonstrating how "the class struggle in France created circumstances and relationships that enabled a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero's part." (For what it's worth, I've read The Eighteenth Brumaire twice and haven't found the level of confusion and reliance on guess-work that Alford reports. That's not meant to diminish the quality of The Craft of Inquiry, but it does illustrate the fact that each of us has his or her own lens.)

Alford's analyses of Weber's The Protestand Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Durkheim's Suicide are similarly instructive. They reveal both the unanticipated difficulties and theoretial brilliance that went into the construction of these masterpieces. To his credit, when discussing the work of 19th Century giants or contemporary luminaries such as William Julius Williams, Alford freely acknowledges that "rhetorical power," a really compelling account based on imperfect data, dubious conceptualizations, and questionable inferences can make a research-based, theoretically informed work much more persuasive than it otherwise would be.

Clearly,The Craft of Inquiry is not a conventional cookbook that presents artificially antiseptic, grossly over-simplified accounts of how research should be done. Tidy little prescriptions such as (1) read the literature, (2) formulate an hypothesis, (3) collect pertinent data, and (4) compute suitable statistics have no place in Alford's book or his world of research. Such clear-cut, sequentially ordered, no back-tracking admonitions deny the craftmanship that enables disciplined inquiry to help us better understand our social world. Yes, research reports are often written up in this formulaic way, but that is just a gloss, an obligatory cover for the complex processes on which the reports are actually based.

This is a good book, one that puts to shame many of the how-to manuals that pass for introductions to social research. I do, however, wish that the author had given more thought to his references to multiple regression analysis. Too often his accounts of the place and limitations of this technique and related multivariate methods are clumsy and misleading. An example is Alford's claim (as I understand him) that independent variables must be statistically independent. In truth, they almost never are, and that's why one of the primary virtues of multiple regression is that each independent variable serves as a control variiable for all other independent variables. In the absence of really strong associations, correlated independent variables are not cause for concern.

One last thought, Alford warns readers that data should always be collected after research questions are formulated. In my experience, however, the ready availability of a data set that permits a researcher to address interesting issues often precedes the formulation of research questions. This may be one instance in which Alfrod lapsed into conventional textbookish ways of reasoning.

As already noted, The Craft of Inquiry won't teach you how to do research, but it may help you do better research than you're already doing. It's the sort of book that could be written only by someone who had devoted decades to doing research of varying kinds and who has learned the lessons this enterprise has to teach.