Creating Common Ground or (Re)producing Gendered Paradigm Wars?

Nikki C. Townsley and Cynthia Stohl

Ann Oakley. Experiments in Knowing: Gender and Method in the Social Sciences. New York: The New Press, 2000, viii + 402 pages. $30.00.

In his genealogy of the prison system, Michel Foucault (1997) claims not to be interested in writing the history of the past but "writing the history of the present" (31). In a similar fashion, Ann Oakley, in her latest book, Experiments in Knowing: Gender and Methods in Social Science, aims not to write a history of the social sciences but a history of present social scientific practices. Oakley is particularly interested in the ways that gender—"the historical cultural standards about masculinity and femininity" (21)—has been infused into the ways we frame qualitative and quantitative ways of knowing and how this infusion has created oppositional modes of research practice. She argues that the paradigm wars have served to minimize the usefulness of social scientific research. Her point of reference throughout the book is research regarding women’s health, but the issues she raises are applicable to all social scientific inquiry. Oakley’s overarching goal is to develop an emancipatory social science, a term she uses to describe social science research that is both democratic and interventionist. Oakley is interested in research aimed to improve our quality of life. Thus, she seeks to identify methodologies that produce the most reliable and democratic ways of knowing—methods that not only bridge the gap between ourselves and Others but also ensure that those who intervene in Other people’s lives do so with the most benefit and the least harm.

The questions Oakley raises in regard to the relationship between the researcher and the researched, the place of experience and experimentation, the question of whose experience counts most, issues of reliability, validity, and generalizability, and the tension between qualitative and quantitative research(ers) are all familiar to communication researchers. The gendered dichotomy or the "feminization of qualitative research" and the "masculinization of quantitative research" are also familiar parts of the terrain of communication research. As more scholars within our field seek to find "common ground" as a basis for future research, Oakley’s book is quite provocative and pragmatic as she offers an alternative way of conceptualizing the divide. She argues that the contribution to be made from experimental science has been interrupted by the gendered ideology and politics of the paradigm struggle, and the solution, then, is the use of "randomized controlled trials" (RCTs), which "objectively" measure the efficiency of different interventions on different groups of people, and thus provide productive means of assessing contemporary social problems. Although RCTs are not routinely utilized in the field of communication, her general insights can be usefully appropriated.

Oakley’s book begins with her history of the present. Titled "Modern Problems," this section articulates a position that simultaneously applauds and decries contemporary feminist thought and qualitative research practices. Communication scholars (particularly critical and feminist researchers) who know Oakley for her oft cited "Interviewing Women" article will not be surprised by her focus on gender and method, nor by her claim that there is a strong need for a critical ethical approach to all methodology. Indeed, in the early part of the text, through anecdotes, life histories of critical players in social science, reliance on the fictional works of Charles Dickens and Sinclair Lewis amongst others, and detailed analyses of several large research projects, Oakley deftly shows how across time the qualitative/quantitative dichotomy has embodied gendered ideological representations. In particular, she identifies the power relations that have shaped and constrained these ideological and gendered divisions within social science.

This book, however, is not merely a description of the gendered methodological positioning of today, but a passionate and surprising argument for the need to rehabilitate and reconceptualize quantitative and experimental ways of knowing with techniques that can be productively used to meet the goals of an emancipatory social science. To this end, Oakley chides feminist scholars for rejecting quantitative analyses out of hand. She approvingly quotes Helen Roberts, who argues, "there is nothing helpful in the current climate about an aversion to looking at figures or to understand how they may be analyzed and used" (299). At the same time, Oakley presents a strident critique of qualitative and feminist methods suggesting that they unwittingly mask power differentials between the researcher and the researched. She argues that qualitative researchers obfuscate their power to define the research problem as well as the means by which "findings" are produced. She asserts, "in-depth interviewing and ethnographic observations may only bring us nearer to the truths that flourish inside researchers’ heads" (72). Oakley pleads for a critical and ethical approach to all methodology by advocating how and why the experimental research paradigm, embodied in the RCT, presents researchers with opportunities to reflect and analyze critically within an ethical and democratic model to enact social good.

The second part of Experiments in Knowing, "A Brief History of Methodology," offers an expansive history of the development of science. Oakley reviews how original empirical science grew out of changes in the social and political environment of the 15^th and 17^th centuries including the decline of the power of the Papacy, the secularization of society, and the rise in power of the nation-state. She makes the point that "empirically based science was a startlingly democratic idea for it opened the gates of valid knowledge to anyone willing to put their ideas to a practical test" (76). She notes, for example, that Galileo chose to write in Italian rather than Latin so that the glass workers in Venice and the average man in Rome could share his ideas. Margaret Cavendish, the first woman to publish scientific works, illustrated philosophical and social policy issues during the 16^th and 17^th century through plays and science fiction novels, practices designed to democratize knowledge.

Yet, Oakley aptly notes the paradox of open knowledge, as the more open empirical research became, the more oppressive it was to women. According to Oakley, the marginal role of women is rooted in the classic distinction between nature (as embodied by woman) and science (man’s attempt to control nature). The subsequent rise of quantification as the primary means to control and contain "subjective" feelings grew from within the gendered hierarchy of social relations. Thus, her inclusion of women such as Cavendish, as well as Florence Nightingale, Jane Addams, and Beatrice Webb in her discussion of the introduction of statistics to social analyses aims to rewrite the history of science to show female participation. At the same time, however, it substantiates women’s marginal role in the development of social science. For example, Addams used empirical research modeled after Charles Booth in order to map patterns of inequality in Chicago neighborhoods during the early 20^th century. However, her "caring" work was labeled social reform, not social science. Oakley points out the irony of Addams’s sequestered science, for social science itself was originally fueled by the need to manage changes in class and gender relations resulting from urbanization, industrialization, and so forth. As Oakley points out, the survey was developed, in part, as a "science of the poor" (132).

Oakley continues her (feminist) retelling of the history of science and the development of social science with her inclusion of humanizing anecdotes about many key figures. We learn of the personal indiscretions, psychological crises, idiosyncratic desires, and pathological secrecy of renowned figures such as Bacon, Descartes, and Hobbs. In effect, Oakley reminds us that the masculinization of science and social science was never a smooth process without its own flaws and contradictions.

In the third part of the book, "Experiments and Their Enemies," Oakley examines the early years of experimental sociology in the United States including how the "cult of efficiency" contributed to the acceptance of experimental methods across institutions. She notes however that the American embrace of empirical research did not go unchallenged. Oakley illustrates how the history of the past, including associations of social science with Nazi experimentation and vivisection, has generated a resistance to experimental methods that is, for her, unfortunate. She argues that randomly controlled experimental trials have been unfairly associated with the ideology of these abuses of power. In fact, it is her central claim throughout the latter part of the book that experimental methods, rather than inherently evil or abusive, provide the opportunity for a truly democratic research process.

In the final section of the book, "Moving On," Oakley borrows from John Dewey to reiterate her goal of social science as "disclosing relations not otherwise apparent" (292). That is, in order for qualitative or quantitative researchers to truly engage in democratic research for all, they must take responsibility for identifying the universal patterns—not individual cases—that constitute human experience. According to Oakley, the recent trends of postmodernism and post-feminism threaten this goal by placing "social inequality into the personal cupboard of privately experienced suffering" (298). Instead, RCTs address the limits of "subjectivity" by generating systemic knowledge about the safety and efficacy of commonly applied health interventions for women including, for example, the use of psychotropic drugs, hormonal replacement therapy, cancer screening, and so forth.

Thus, for Oakley, doing basic research is simply not enough. What is needed is a pragmatic, systemic evaluation of the efficiency of women’s health interventions, not theories or models of these practices alone. By providing more systemic evidence of efficient treatments and accessibility to such knowledge, as in the case of the Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization devoted to collecting and dispersing information on evidence-based health care, says Oakley, the original goal of empirical research—democracy—can be achieved.

In the end, Oakley’s book leaves us with laudable aims—reconciling the gendered ideological divisions between competing research paradigms and making experimental research more democratic, pragmatic, and ethical. Unfortunately, by the end, Oakley creates less "common ground" and, instead, (re)produces an embodiment of the very divided terrain she seeks to redress. These unresolved tensions are apparent from Chapter 1. Here we read a provocative, passionate set of fieldnotes written by Oakley during the fertile period of the book’s conception, in which she introduces the reader to her own journey of paradigm reconciliation. "There’s really no beginning to the day, because I wake several times in the night with the half-known fragments of dreams in a web of limbs and bedding which I at first think are not my own. . . I watch myself as I live; observing; measuring; coding; classifying and trying to come to terms with the different meanings that emerge from this process. I am the qualitative knower, and also the quantitative one" (6).

But rather than continuing in or returning to this personal genre, we are left instead with a text of "the absent scholar." The autobiographical journey grounding and infusing the development of her book is downplayed, even lost, to her attempt to persuade readers of the scientific viability of the RCT to produce the most pragmatic and emancipatory knowledge. By distinguishing the RCT as the most pragmatic means toward Truth, Oakley recreates the very divisions she critiques. Indeed, Oakley’s individual experience with methodology and gender has unequivocally shaped her argument, and possibly future experimental research protocol, as a result. By the end of the text she dismisses her own experience and experiments of knowing.

Oakley also dismisses postmodern thought because of its so-called apolitical positioning and its disregard for a material social reality. Ironically, this "totalizing" of all postmodernists mirrors her very frustration with qualitative researchers’ unjustified dismissal of all quantitative research. She says, for example, "It is one of my premises that most people operate as though reality does exist. It is only academics who make a living arguing the opposite" (20). For Oakley, postmodernists are unconnected to the "real" world and its consequences. However, a more nuanced read of postmodernism, particularly feminist postmodernism , might well augment her argument that ways of knowing are ideologically valued. A central premise of postmodern feminist discourse is that patriarchy frames current ideological and gendered debates in social science. By more fully addressing postmodernism, Oakley would be forced to address the consequences of ideology on the politics of research. That is, although she suggests that the dark cloud of eugenics and vivisection in experimental research is merely ideological, and not an inherent evil, she leaves the question as to how one can do experimental research outside of ideology unanswered. Oakley simply does not adequately address how we write a present history of scientific practices that is not shaped by corporate or other dominant interests.

Another tension exists as Oakley equates not only qualitative methods with feminist methods, but quantitative research with experimental methods. One would be remiss to suggest that all qualitative scholars are feminists and all feminists use qualitative methods. Indeed, a variety of distinctly feminist methods flourish, as do qualitative methods exist ranging from focus groups to interviewing to ethnography to even statistical, computer based analyses. Moreover, not all quantitative methods are experimental. The field of communication, for example, comprises many different forms of quantitative methods including network analysis, computational modeling, simulations, and survey methodologies. Although Oakley recognizes that there exist many tools to address many different questions, she seems to fall prey to the ideology of paradigm warfare herself by seeing both qualitative and quantitative methods as homogeneous, if separate, entities.

Moreover, by definition, an RCT used in women’s healthcare treatment research must have a control group and an experimental group of research participants. Those individuals within a control group will not receive treatment. A question of morality arises when we consider, for example, that a woman diagnosed with cancer does not receive treatment because, with the toss of a coin, she is relegated to the control group. Indeed, Oakley discusses the role of chance at length but ultimately the issue is left unresolved. The reality of disease, with which Oakley is adamantly concerned, is clearly not eradicated for the women or other research participants involved in RCTs.

These unresolved tensions leave the reader with many questions, including: What is the purpose of research? For Oakley, it is emancipation. But not all researchers would answer this question similarly. What should the goal of scholarship be? Evidence based public policies? Corporate partnerships? Social change? In the end, Oakley leaves us with an ideal history of present social scientific practices as well as unresolved tensions about the role of scholarship in mediating (gendered) experiments and experience in contemporary society. Her book provides provocative questions and a fascinating perspective but still few answers for communication scholars wishing to rehabilitate and reconceptualize quantitative and experimental ways of knowing and create "common ground" in the discipline.