Researching Values with Qualitative Methods

Empathy, Moral Boundaries and the Politics of Research

Antje Bednarek-Gilland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317065463
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

In several branches of social science, interest in values and moral evaluations has increased in recent years, with group values taking centre-stage, yet a satisfactory, theoretical account of the concept of values and their role in social life remains lacking. Engaging with theories of value formation and the role of values in everyday life found in ethics, classical sociology and contemporary social theory and their implications for empirical work, Researching Values with Qualitative Methods argues for a pragmatist approach both to understanding values and the manner in which they are formed, as well as exploring the ways in which they can be studied empirically, using qualitative research methods. In this way, this book promises to resolve many of the practical problems involved in fieldwork with political groups, including the prominent question of how to account for the researcher's own values. Illustrated with examples from published as well as new research, this book provides the foundation for the theoretical understanding of values and their empirical investigation, thus strengthening the connection between social theory and the development of research methods. As such, it will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists and geographers with interests in values, social theory and research methodology.

Chapter 1 Values in the Social Sciences

DOI: 10.4324/9781315605623-1

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 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.

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 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’.

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). 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

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

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.

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

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.

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 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 pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Values in the Social Sciences
• 2 Empathy, Verstehen and Values
• 3 Moral Values and Qualitative Research
• 4 The Political Values of the Research Community
• Conclusion How to do Value-Sensitive Fieldwork
• Bibliography
• Index