4
evaluative criteria is almost second nature. In sum, there is a particular reading
experience that is the result of your research practice; its particularity is evinced by the
fact that both graduate and undergraduate students must be taught these critical reading
skills.
Now imagine that as part of the peer review process, you, as this traditionally
trained political scientist, have been sent an interpretive study of two government
agencies based on sixteen months of participant-observation, numerous in-depth
interviews, and document analysis. The manuscript offers a radically different reading
experience: none of the variables have been operationalized in the ways to which you are
accustomed; no causal model is offered; there are no tables reporting statistical analyses;
there is no discussion of generalizability. In short, this study is unrecognizable to you as a
piece of scientific research: it does not fit your sense of what rigorous, objective research
looks like, and is. Your standard set of evaluative criteria simply do not apply, and you
question whether such research qualifies as social science.
Your experience is similar to
that of the email list participant quoted at the beginning of the section: the “rich and
complex” data reported in the study make you “nervous.” What sort of evaluation can
you, would you, send to the journal editor or to the author? As Shapiro implies (in the
second epigraph), if you are unaware or dismissive of another research gestalt, you will
clearly be disappointed in this manuscript. To assess it on its own terms, you must
reorient yourself and ask, “What are the strengths of interpretive methodologies? What
are the purposes of such research?” Such a reorientation is essential to understanding the
interpretive gestalt and applying adequately its evaluative criteria
.
Convention