With the easter holliday behind us the next coupple of months should ideally be very productive. For me this means a) data collection, b) essay writing, and c) whatever else there is time for. During data collection I will, of course, be practicing a lot of scientific method.

This practice, incidentally, is what I’ll be writing an essay on for a methods course I’m taking this semester (which all of a sudden*, it appears, resumes with lectures tomorrow). More precisely I’m thinking about writing an essay on the discrepancy between methodology, as described in a scientific papers methodology-section, and methodology as it is actually carried out or performed on a day-to-day basis by people working in the humanities and social sciences. I thought I’d use some of my own (very limited) work as a kind of case study. I want to do an introspective analysis of some snippets of my research in order to expose how we, on paper, construct a scientific universe which is much more clean, “sterile” and pure than the methods we in fact use. One short example: Think about how we (or at least some of us) often write that we “apply” this or that method to some material or other. This implies that there is a reality out there which we, the researchers, could capture simply by the application of methodology. Much like a wall becomes red when red paint is applied, scientific results emerge when method is applied, be it qualitative or quantitative. Look at this simple example found searching the term “qualitative methods were applied” in google scholar. Carvalho et al. explain how:

I. Qualitative methods were applied in the analysis of textual data.

II. Categories identified by the analysis were adapted into building the process model.

From this account it sounds as if the “real world” is a lion or some other wild animal, that we can capture  simply by throwing at it our very special net – the scientific method. The actions are clean, there is little room for individual variation. We apply A, B is the result, in this case the identification of several categories. In reality, of course, the process is much more messy, I think we all know this – allthough STS’ers might possibly admit it more easily than, say a “normal” psychologist (as in the example above…). The simple linguistic example of “application” is, of course, only one of many ways in which we camuflage the very mundane nature of what we do.

Not very provocative, nor really a new point (Science in action, anyone?), but I guess I’m sort of going out on a limb by using my own work to display how these things are played out, and I havent quite decided how to do it all yet. The text it self will be a sort of meta-study in the practice I’m talking about since I still have to keep within the framework of a “scientific” text (The methods section could be good fun, I guess). Should give room for a many funny footnotes, as well. All things considered it should  be a healthy reflexive excercise which I sort of look forward to.

*)Yes, really – all of a sudden!