In the context of qualitative interview questions like this, straightforwardly taking the answers to be about “the problems black people face” or “the problems the police faces”, presupposes, about individual opinions on what these problems are, that these beliefs are neither incorrect, confused, or otherwise inaccurate. Again, imagine interviewing pre war Christian Germans to find out “the problems Germans face with Jews”.
Qualitative interviews are even less reliable than opinion polls, since in those polls we get at least statistically significant results about which (possibly unjustified or incorrect) opinions are common and which are uncommon. But open ended questions can’t be statistically analyzed in this way.
Qualitative interviews can have value to come up with questions for opinion polls in the first place, or to come up with hypotheses to test by other means. I would just warn against overestimating the value of such open ended questions by interpreting them to directly report actual experiences or problems.
Again, imagine interviewing pre war Christian Germans to find out “the problems Germans face with Jews”.
I don’t have any clear imaginations of what would happen in this case?
Like I know that antisemitism was rampant there at the time, so probably you would get a lot of angry negative opinions. But what would they be? “My pastor’s friend’s niece was killed by a Jew”? “Jews control the banking system which is evil and also they are breeding like rabbits”? “There’s a group of child prostitutes downtown, and their pimp is Jewish”?
I would like to know what the results would be, to be honest. Probably there would be a need to take them with a heavy grain of salt, but I can’t take them with a grain of salt without taking them in the first place.
In the context of qualitative interview questions like this, straightforwardly taking the answers to be about “the problems black people face” or “the problems the police faces”, presupposes, about individual opinions on what these problems are, that these beliefs are neither incorrect, confused, or otherwise inaccurate.
I don’t think we have to take everything as 100% dogma.
Rather, the important part lies in getting a better understanding for each other’s perspectives. There are presumably a lot of things we don’t know, but the information in this survey seems at least to me to be hugely valuable in getting an understanding of what black people face.
Qualitative interviews are even less reliable than opinion polls, since in those polls we get at least statistically significant results about which (possibly unjustified or incorrect) opinions are common and which are uncommon. But open ended questions can’t be statistically analyzed in this way.
I think a qualitative question can reasonably well prove the existence of an opinion in a person. This allows lower-bounding the prevalence of the opinion, as one knows that it exists in everyone who expressed it. In particular, qualitative questions automatically weight the probability of an opinion being expressed by its prevalence in the population, because only those who have the opinion would express it.
However, I think a lack of mentioning an opinion in a qualitative question does not necessarily prove that one does not have that opinion, because qualitative questions are fairly loose and so one might simply not get around to saying it. I think this can probably be mitigated in a qualitative interview, as the interviewer can control the conversation to keep going back until the opinion has been confirmed or disconfirmed.
One other worry I forgot to mention however: I could be totally wrong here, but presumably most applications of this kind of “standpoint epistemology”, in the last ten years, comes from researchers I would suspect of being far-left activists. If so, those people would of course be very eager to interview people they believe in their political worldview to be victims of oppression, i.e. especially black people and women. They would very rarely interview white men or Asians or police officers about their “experiences” or “problems”. This can lead to publication bias, where a lot of “problems” and “experiences” of particular groups get published, but hardly any of other groups which fall outside the concern of the predominant political ideology of those researchers. Then the evidence is biased in virtue of the selection effects at place.
I’m not 100% sure about this, but from what I’ve heard a lot of left-wing academics don’t even try all that hard to reveal black people’s experiences, but instead mainly use black people as a tool to say that right-wingers are bad.
I agree that this sort of thing is a problem, but I’d think it is best addressed by doing more to map out different people’s experiences in a publicly accessible way.
That is what I am getting at when I say:
And these principles don’t have to be disempowering. While “shut up and listen” may sound tiring, it is important to remember that going out to find people willing to educate you (possibly in exchange for payment, as in this post) is an active action you can take in order to improve your understanding of your world. Knowledge is power!
One of the benefits of Standpoint Epistemology is that it is very efficient. People naturally observe and remember many of their experiences as they live their life, and it is relatively quick to just ask them about it. This post only took me about a day’s worth of work, and less than $100 worth of money. If scaled up to be more comprehensive, it would presumably take more work, but presumably also be more informative.
My ideal outcome for this post would be if more people went out and mapped more groups’ perspectives of more situations.
In the context of qualitative interview questions like this, straightforwardly taking the answers to be about “the problems black people face” or “the problems the police faces”, presupposes, about individual opinions on what these problems are, that these beliefs are neither incorrect, confused, or otherwise inaccurate. Again, imagine interviewing pre war Christian Germans to find out “the problems Germans face with Jews”.
Qualitative interviews are even less reliable than opinion polls, since in those polls we get at least statistically significant results about which (possibly unjustified or incorrect) opinions are common and which are uncommon. But open ended questions can’t be statistically analyzed in this way.
Qualitative interviews can have value to come up with questions for opinion polls in the first place, or to come up with hypotheses to test by other means. I would just warn against overestimating the value of such open ended questions by interpreting them to directly report actual experiences or problems.
I don’t have any clear imaginations of what would happen in this case?
Like I know that antisemitism was rampant there at the time, so probably you would get a lot of angry negative opinions. But what would they be? “My pastor’s friend’s niece was killed by a Jew”? “Jews control the banking system which is evil and also they are breeding like rabbits”? “There’s a group of child prostitutes downtown, and their pimp is Jewish”?
I would like to know what the results would be, to be honest. Probably there would be a need to take them with a heavy grain of salt, but I can’t take them with a grain of salt without taking them in the first place.
I don’t think we have to take everything as 100% dogma.
Rather, the important part lies in getting a better understanding for each other’s perspectives. There are presumably a lot of things we don’t know, but the information in this survey seems at least to me to be hugely valuable in getting an understanding of what black people face.
I think a qualitative question can reasonably well prove the existence of an opinion in a person. This allows lower-bounding the prevalence of the opinion, as one knows that it exists in everyone who expressed it. In particular, qualitative questions automatically weight the probability of an opinion being expressed by its prevalence in the population, because only those who have the opinion would express it.
However, I think a lack of mentioning an opinion in a qualitative question does not necessarily prove that one does not have that opinion, because qualitative questions are fairly loose and so one might simply not get around to saying it. I think this can probably be mitigated in a qualitative interview, as the interviewer can control the conversation to keep going back until the opinion has been confirmed or disconfirmed.
Okay, these points seem reasonable.
One other worry I forgot to mention however: I could be totally wrong here, but presumably most applications of this kind of “standpoint epistemology”, in the last ten years, comes from researchers I would suspect of being far-left activists. If so, those people would of course be very eager to interview people they believe in their political worldview to be victims of oppression, i.e. especially black people and women. They would very rarely interview white men or Asians or police officers about their “experiences” or “problems”. This can lead to publication bias, where a lot of “problems” and “experiences” of particular groups get published, but hardly any of other groups which fall outside the concern of the predominant political ideology of those researchers. Then the evidence is biased in virtue of the selection effects at place.
I’m not 100% sure about this, but from what I’ve heard a lot of left-wing academics don’t even try all that hard to reveal black people’s experiences, but instead mainly use black people as a tool to say that right-wingers are bad.
I agree that this sort of thing is a problem, but I’d think it is best addressed by doing more to map out different people’s experiences in a publicly accessible way.
That is what I am getting at when I say:
My ideal outcome for this post would be if more people went out and mapped more groups’ perspectives of more situations.