Do the social sciences create phenomena?: the example of public opinion research

Abstract

This paper is an investigation into the philosophy and the history of the social sciences. Some philosophers of the social sciences have suggested that a key feature of the natural sciences is their capacity to create phenomena, and that the social sciences do not meet this criterion. We suggest, to the contrary, that the social sciences can and do create phenomena, in the sense of new ways of describing and acting that have been used to produce all sorts of effects. Like the natural sciences, the social sciences create their phenomena through the procedures that are established to discover them. But the creation of phenomena is a complex, technically dif cult and contested process and its success rare. Historically, this argument is developed through a case-study of the development and evolution of public opinion research in the USA and Britain. We argue that by the 1950s public opinion produced a version of the world that had entered 'into the true'. Special attention is given to technical considerations in the development of public opinion research, especially the genealogy of a particular research technology, that of the representative sample. Whilst we are not concerned with demarcation criteria, we argue that there are some important differences between the social and the natural sciences; that the former have a less concentrated 'spatial mix' and a slower 'tempo of creativity'. None the less, in this particular case, the social sciences have played a key role in the creation of opinioned persons and an opinionated society.

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“…(2000:145) 5 In this respect, McInerney is in agreement with qualitative social researchers who argue that fixed-choice questions impose particular ways of thinking about experience (Cicourel, 1964). Osborne and Rose (1999) elaborate a constructionist epistemological position further, arguing that such social scientific methods as opinion polls, 'create their phenomena through the procedures that are established to discover them ' (1999: 367). Of course, constructionist epistemology can be applied to media reports themselves: is a concern with the 'accuracy' of media reporting of statistics the only legitimate response we may have?…”

“…One does not have to adopt the constructionism of authors like Osborne and Rose (1999) to believe this, but instead accept 'inaccuracy' as almost inevitable.…”

Performing Environmental Change: The Politics of Social Science Methods

“…Indeed, in subsequent developments in social research, methods like the social survey were explicitly stripped of their activist aura, and replaced with the 'neutral' frame of scientific method, in the promotion of focus groups, polling methods, and so on. At the same time, methods like the focus group and the opinion poll came to be celebrated precisely for their capacity to inform government (Osborne and Rose, 1999), and many of the methods that are deployed today to involve publics in environmental issues implicitly or explicitly draw on these scientifically framed methods for capturing and aggregating people's views, preferences, and so on (Lezaun and Soneryd, 2007). Göran Sundqvist's (2014) contribution to this theme issue speaks in interesting ways to this topic of the seemingly nonpolitical political capacities of social scientific methods in his study of procedures for increasing public participation in technoscientific conflicts.…”

Performative policy studies: realizing “transition management”

“…Giddens 1982 on "double hermeneutics"). The social sciences thus not only create phenomena by technically configuring certain knowable realities of social practice (in the laboratory, and then by applying 'social technology'); they already do so by participating in broader ongoing societal debates where concepts are taken and shape social action in a more distributed manner (Osborne andRose 1999, Law andUrry 2004). Even if these more diffuse kinds of performativity are difficult to trace, there are plausible accounts of how, for example, the very reality of individual rational agency (Giddens 1990, Barnes 2000 or the modern welfare state may be understood as a reality co-produced by the social sciences, not so much by technically fixing and expanding a laboratory reality, but by their embedding in a wider discourse which shapes the (self-)understanding of social actors and thus their patterns of behaviour (e.g.…”