August 28, 2005

• I'm also interested in saying "interested" a really lot.
• So do we have to read the book or is there a précis somewhere?
• Presumably, if she got published, she had the students sign a waver saying that they agreed to be studied and that they would have their identity protected and had to go through a human subjects review board that has very strict guidelines. The thing that is more interesting for me is why the NY Sun and CNN felt that they needed to reveal the name of the prof. Presumably the annonymoty was originally to protect the students. If he name was on the book, it wouldn't be hard for a nosy mom or dad to connect the dots and find out that their daughter or son wasn't spending 24-7 studying and cause the student endless ammounts of grief or even something more serious as the book being potentially used as evidence for kicking students out of school. I don't think there is any reason why, though that she didn't have to tell the participants that she was a prof. As someone who has done ethnographic research on college students, they may act distant for a little bit, but they quickly forget that you are studying them.
• You can look inside the book at Amazon if you want.
• I'm confused—don't the links all say she did reveal who she was and what she was doing if students asked her?
• She sort of revealed who she was if asked. She said she was doing a study, but not that she was a prof. at the same university. (I think. She seems to say different things in the different links.) If students didn't ask her, she let them assume what they would.
• I hardly see the reason for fuss.
• I think that would be a good book to read to learn about the ways in which modern cultural anthropologists inform their subjects and, if you're a student, decide whether students on the whole are fairly represented. I'm going to have to find a copy. I mean, when I was an anthro student, emphasis was on the ethnographers of the 1950s to the '70s. I didn't do a lot of the cultural/social anthro stuff because I find ethnographic studies sort of boring (no offense to any social anthropologists reading this) but I had a lot of fun breaking down Chagnon's work in the Amazon in the 1960s. I don't know much about how ethnographies are done now. And I enjoy hearing theories about why people are the way they are.
• People are the way they are because of the innate wisdom of unfettered free markets.
• And because butter tastes so damn good.
• Osmosis.
• All I can say is that it must be a slow news day when two major news outlets spend the time to out an undercover researcher.
• I find her conclusions about student live extremely interesting (and don't give a damn about the ethics of anonymity). Here's the money quote:

  In a survey of students in her dorm, Ms. Nathan found that more than half worked part-time jobs, with most of them putting in at least 15 hours per week. The costs of attending college weighed on students, and debt shaped how they thought about their education. Intellectual life, and even hobbies, seemed to matter far less than landing lucrative jobs. Students tended to participate in résumé-enhancing professional clubs and volunteer activities far more often than in organizations that interested them personally.

  People respond to the pressure of circumstances. If you make them borrow a lot and work part-time, of course they're going to be obsessed with résumé-enhancing activities and indifferent to politics and philosophy. I'm just glad I went to college 35 years ago, and I feel sorry for these kids.
• It's not even time; it's place. I went to a women's college six-to-two years ago, and when I started grad school last year (after a break of one), I started going to a big state school. Utter, utter culture shock. Class starts Monday. I TA Anthro 100. I still don't get the kids, and I'm only 24. No one would have tried to sue me for giving them a C back at my own undergrad institution. I wonder if I should read this or if I should be jealous that her IRB let her get away with some wobbly crap.
• I have no idea what an ethnography is, but it sounds painful. Okay, now that I got that out of the way... I think this is pretty interesting. I was lucky that my parents were able to pay my tuition, room and board. I worked very little in university, so I was able to focus on school and have almost no social life thanks to being broke. My experience was completely different from the average but I knew many fellow students in this situation. I think the weirdest thing is that the system seems to encourage university students to become career-driven workaholics. I can't prove that's a bad thing, but it doesn't seem entirely good, either. It seems impossible to take university for the sheer love of learning.
• Second, I'm interested in the ethics of Small's decision to not reveal her true identity to the students she studied. She did when they asked about her life - this seems to be standard ethnography practice. I heard Steve Striffler talking about his research at a Tyson Food plant - and his situation was similar. I think he did conciously reveal his profession to is co-workers, like Nathan did in her sexuality class. Most of the workers knew by the end - a few were surprised, none offended. The management didn't care enough to ask. I am definitely going to read this book. I have realised that my undergrad experience, while fairly recent, was far from typical (I lived off-campus, didn't work that many hours, had little social life, mostly did the readings and talked a lot) and that it would be both fascinating and maybe help me understand the undergrads a little more, rather than just being annoyed at how noisy they are.
• That said, they really shouldn't have outed her. That was very disrespectful to the privacy of the students in the book.
• Not revealing your true motives is not standard practice in ethnography. As a phd student who is going to be doing an ethnography for my dissertation, I've taken classes on ethnography and done some myself. Basically, the issue is that many ethnographers, the author of this book included, for reasons I've never completely understood, seem to like to do ethnography on people elsewhere be it Africa, South America or Eastern Europe. In these cases, unless there is some risk of personal harm, they will almost ALWAYS tell the peopole they are working with who they are. They might not say, "I am interested in X," but they will almost always say "I am prof. Jones and from University X." Now, they always do that when going abroad to study, but many have great reservations about studying people in their own community. Last semester I took a class with a bunch of people from the midwest who were almost all studying people in former Soviet block countries. More than once I was asked, "Where do you do your fieldwork?" and I would say, "Ummm... in the computer lab on Friday nights..." They had just as hard a time understanding why I would study people just like me as I did understanding why people would study people so unlike themselves. So when it comes to American ethnographers studying Americans, they often get a little weird. Ethnography is an interesting enterprise because there are many ways of doing it. I cannot imagine why a researcher wouldn't tell the people what they were doing. In my eyes it is very dishonest. I taught a class last year where I had undergrads doing their own ethnography of their friends and so I don't think this book or what this researcher did is newsworthy whatsoever...
• ...I would study people just like me... (one of the more famous ethnographies and an entertaining read).
• We have our students read about the Nacirema on the second day of class. I like to see their reactions to it.
• "My job as an ethnographer is to protect the people I'm working with in the same way I'd want to be protected if I were in the subject's shoes," says Ms. Eisenhart. "It is just simply unethical to do something which is primarily for your own benefit, to advance your own career." Yeah. To someone not in academia this positionality may not seem like a big deal--I know I read several comments above that asked what the big deal was--but using students for research without informed consent is exploitive, even if it seems that the harm or potential for harm is small. The NAU prof seems like she came out of old-school anthro where exploiting the subjects was considered just part of the price of finding out local practices. Typical colonialist bs. My work is within community service agencies as participatory action research, and you can be damn sure that our IRB questions my ethical approach and requires informed consent. NAU's IRB either rubberstamped Small's research or is not particularly up on the latest standards. The precedents for why we go overboard on protection of study participants are: Historical Abuses Involving Experiments with Human Subjects * Tuskegee Syphilis Study * Nazi War Crimes * Human Radiation Experiments * Willowbrook Study * Project Camelot * Milgram’s Study * Johns Hopkins Cases from the MSU IRB website:"Ethical Issues Include * The exploitation of vulnerable populations * Lack of informed consent * Coercion * Deception Additional Information The Human Radiation Experiments, German Nazi experiments, Tuskegee Syphilis, Milgram, Willowbrook Studies, and Hopkins cases all had in common, the exploitation of vulnerable populations for research, utilizing subjects without informed consent, and in many cases, using a consent practice that was arguably coercive and deceptive." Now, granted, Small's research did not involve any of the invasive medical/biological situations addressed above, but inculcating a strict code of ethics is IMO imperative or the corners will be cut and ethical lapses (Enron, Adelphi, and so on) become commonplace and shrugged off. I'd rather shoot for the tougher standard and suffer the loss of such research as Small's.
• Her work did pass an ethics review board - and from what my friends in the social sciences tell me, they tend to err far more often on the side of caution (mostly because of those studies that you mention). We don't know everything about what she did or did not tell her subjects - I just know that anthropologists don't always disclose immediately, because it isn't appropriate or would cause a level of alienation from the subject. Is deception a priori bad? Psychologists often have to use elements of deception - subjects know they are in an experiment, but not always what is being studied. To be honest, and as someone not so removed from the undergrads she studied, I would react just like Striffler's co-workers - I would be surprised, but not offended. Actually, and then I would be totally flattered to be part of an anthropology study. But maybe I shouldn't talk. I work with human subjects without any ethics overview and no confidentiality.
• While my memory of the era when I was in college is hazy, I think that if I had found out that a 50-something year old person had told me he or she was studying me, I probably would have adjusted my behavior one way or another, depending on my mood of the moment, skewing the results. On the other hand, I would probably not have been very open with someone more than 30 years older than I, even if she hadn't revealed her agenda. You younguns are better able than I to tell whether her results were accurate, but it seems to me that she must have gotten across generational barriers if they are.
• At first I was ready to shrug off complaints about the ethics of such an anonymous, non-intrusive study, but this has turned into an interesting and informative discussion.
• Think ye have to look at each case separately and not generalize, he said, generalizing like mad. Seriously, since an ethical review board approved her project I can't see a problem. Unless it can be demonstrated the review process is inadequate or flawed.
• Nearly all human subjects review boards are total overkill for anthropology/socialogy-type folks. They are mainly designed for people doing psychology or medical experiments where people are doing things that are potentially life-alteringly dangerous. For those of us that just want to talk to and hand out with people, the process is insanely complex and paranoid. The human subjects review boards I have came into contact with are mainly concerned with not getting sued, so I'm sure that the board in question made sure that whatever she did was legally above board. However, legally ok is not always the same as morally ok...
• The Human Radiation Experiments, German Nazi experiments, Tuskegee Syphilis, Milgram, Willowbrook Studies, and Hopkins cases... Enron, Adelphi... I'd rather shoot for the tougher standard and suffer the loss of such research as Small's. Jesus, talk about straw men. "If you don't fill out a bunch of over-the-top forms and tell every single person you meet everything about your study, you're just like the Nazis! Or Enron, whichever scares you more." Please, this woman was talking with college kids and analyzing the results. Get some perspective, and don't be so goddam self-righteous.
• jccalhoun has it right. Interestingly, the woman who gave the junior PhD types in my intake the compulsory ethics session, Dr Deane Fergie, was herself possibly less than lily-white in this respect.