There has been a lot more about Alice Goffman’s On the Run
the last few days.
Lubet’s
response to the response
Although, much of the attention has been focused on the
issue of her possible criminal conduct, it is the methodology of her project
that really concerns me. I have not yet read the book. I have,
however, read her paper in the American Sociological
Review that was based upon the same research. She claims to have spent six
years studying the residents of a neighborhood in Philadelphia. The name of the
neighborhood is a pseudonym as are the names of all the individuals.
Consequently, it is not possible to verify any of her claims. It is not even
possible to check her account against her own field notes. She claims to have
destroyed them. All of this is ostensibly to protect the people who are
described in the book.
Her entire methodology is so alien to my view of research in
the social sciences I find it hard to comprehend. It is not her
immersion in the culture of the people she was studying that concerns me.
It seems like a legitimate method of qualitiative research. Whether you use qualitative or quantitative methods should be determined by the
question you are trying to answer. What puzzles me is the complete lack of
accountability. One of the essential elements of good historical research is to
be clear about the relationship between your conclusions and the sources that
you use. Anyone should be able to follow your trail of sources to see if it
leads to your conclusions. Is anyone going to believe you if you say that you
use evidence from a secret notebook at an undisclosed archive? Could you write
a history dissertation at Princeton based upon a secret diary that you say you
destroyed to protect the author’s privacy? In economics you are generally expected to be ready
to present you data to other researchers or have a very good reason why you
cannot. The American Economic Review, for instance, expects authors to make
their data available. Reinhart and Rogoff got in trouble a while back for a
spreadsheet error, but we should not forget that when a graduate student asked
for the data they gave it to him. Goffman’s entire body of research appears to
depend on “Just trust me.”
I am not saying that she lied. There are troubling
inconsistencies within her accounts and between her accounts and other evidence.
And her response to Lubet’s suggestion that she had committed a crime only adds
another inconsistency. Her account in the book is completely different than the
account in her response. Even if there were not inconsistencies, I would be
concerned about a methodology that places so much weight trusting the author. The
rewards in the social sciences for coming up with results that are deemed
interesting and important are considerable. Goffman got a Ph. D. from
Princeton, a best dissertation award, a book contract, a publication in the
American Sociological Review, a TED talk, and a job at the University of
Wisconsin. The temptations to give people what they want are too great to rely
upon a methodology that provides no means for subsequent researchers to evaluate the evidence.
Note about the anonymous critique: Some might wonder why I
am willing to link to an anonymous critique when I have such a problem with the
anonymity in Goffman’s work. I have seen discussion on the web suggesting that
because this critique is anonymous it should be completely disregarded. I don’t
know why the author prefers to remain anonymous. As long as their argument is
not based upon their authority I do not really care. The Federalist papers were
published under a pseudonym. Gosset’s work on the t distribution was published under
a pseudonym. I do not regard anonymity itself as a problem. The anonymous
author of the critique does not at any point ask me to just trust them. There
is nothing in their argument that hinges on their identity rather than the
evidence.
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