Label for a kidney, anyone?
One of my first encounters with the manipulative power of language was in Mario Pei’s, Weasel Words. His book, alongside a library of other work on propaganda, persuasion, advertising, shows how labelling something can be used to change our perception of things, deceive, lie, mislead. Indeed, today’s covera Continue reading “Label for a kidney, anyone?”
The default male killer
In a recent blog, Deborah Cameron explains and extends the notion of the ‘default male’. To give the most basic and well-known example, in language it is about using for example the male pronoun in reference to the generic person. Speakers, social actors, addressees etc. would have been referred to by the default ‘he’. But I find the example of ‘ethnic jokes’ particularly compelling; the ‘E Continue reading “The default male killer”
Interviewing misery
About ten years ago I was collecting data for my book on men’s depression in a psychiatric hospital in Krakow (I will write a blog about it). There were very few men diagnosed with depression, so when one day three men attending the outpatient clinic agreed to be interviewed, I was over the moon. I had three interviews, did them one after the other! The interviews were great, all lasted over an hour, the men were talking about extremely difficult things, all cried during the interview. All thanked me for listening.
War of the worlds
This is my second venture into the qualitative-quantitative divide. Let me start with the text I referred to in the previous post co-authored by Andy Fugard and Henry Potts . It’s one of the responses to the open letter I talked about.
They make the following points.
1. Qualitative research, as its quantitative equivalent, is vast and heterogeneous.
2. Focusing on research goals might circumvent the debate on qual/quant differences. Continue reading “War of the worlds”