Why a Social Impact Assessor, Social Planner is an Anthropologist in the Field

Why a Social Impact Assessor, Social Planner is an Anthropologist in the Field

Although possessing impressive quantitative analytical skills, a social planner cannot escape being an anthropologist while doing field work. The Founding father Max Weber described sociology as Verstehendesoziologie, which is literally translated as “sociology of understanding”, but which is translated better as interpretive (or interpretative) sociology. The title of this essay should read better as why a social impact assessor or social planner SHOULD BE an anthropologist in the field, because it is never the intention of this writer to employ only an trained anthropologist, but rather train in methods of anthropological field work, every social impact assessor, or social planner.

As the subjects of research are humans, complex living units with a group consciousness, exercising a formidable “facticity” over them [more about this later], and cultural artifacts which possess value to a staggering variety of levels, there’s no social research instrument that can gather information and subsequently make sense of these data better than the person making the research himself using his own humanity and personality (with the attendant armamentarium of social methods of course).

If you accept this, then it does make sense to come out of the field with unstructured notes, and personal observations and commentaries written on the edges of interview questionnaire, rather than a spreadsheet of numerical data base which would later require a LOT of interpretation, even after hours of computer processing

I do agree that the terms often used by social interpreters are sometimes too esoteric to be immediately acceptable. I remember sitting as member of a dissertation committee on a revolutionary approach. For reasons of courtesy I won’t name the school which popularizes it, but the title of their own PhD offering is eloquently expressive of their approach and scope of research – Cosmic Anthropology.

In this specific case, the entire dissertation was based on an interview of 13 respondents. Now if you are very skilled in nonparametric statistics, this sample size would be acceptable, but in that time non parametric statistics has not been popular in the University I was working for. To top it all, the Research Director of the Graduate School was a chemist, who was a firm believer in asymptotic distribution, that is, large sized sample sizes which were randomly collected.

The prospect for the candidate getting her degree was dim, and as the rapid fire questions centered on sampling methodology and statistical validity, was getting dimmer by the minute (in fact, she did get her PhD later; exactly three, costly, and heart wrenching repeat and revise sessions months later. When the advisor herself was asked point blank, “how do you know that the results of your research are valid and reliable?” she answered,

“By resonance”

That session ended in the usual combination of failure and tears, along side with raised eyebrows on the utility of the anthropological method.

TO BE CONTINUED