Sociology. Anthony Giddens
limited. Increasingly, the participants are themselves involved in the research process and may help to formulate questions, comment on the researcher’s interpretations, and receive a copy of the final research report.
As in many other relationships in social life (such as doctors and patients or university lecturers and students), ‘laypeople’ no longer automatically defer to ‘experts’ in the way they might have done one or two generations ago. This broader social process is transforming research practice. Indeed, funding bodies now routinely ask research teams to anticipate the ethical issues they may confront, suggest how they will deal with these, and confirm whether deception will be used, what measures are in place to protect participants from risks, and how findings will be fed back at the end of the study. Clearly, research practice is always embedded within a social and historical context which partly determines what can and cannot legitimately be studied.
In carrying out his research, Humphreys did not reveal his identity as a sociologist, and men who came into the tearoom assumed he was there for the same reasons they were. Although he did not tell direct lies, he also did not reveal the real reason for his presence. Was his behaviour legitimate? This aspect of the research did not put any of the men directly at risk, so perhaps it could be justified. What made Humphreys’ project more controversial was that he took down the vehicle licence plates of his subjects, obtained their home addresses from a friend at the Department of Motor Vehicles, and then visited their homes on the pretence of conducting an unrelated survey. How ethical was this element of the study? Could it ever be justified? Even though he did not reveal to the men’s families anything about the tearooms, the information he gathered could have been damaging. The same-sex activity he observed was illegal at the time, and police officers could have demanded the release of information on the men’s identities. It is also possible that a less skilled investigator could have slipped up when interviewing the families or that Humphreys’ notes could have been seen by others.
The methodology of Li et al. (2010) in Guangzhou, China, shows just how much research ethics and governance have changed since the 1970s. This team conducted semi-structured interviews to find out about participants’ biographies. Like Humphreys, they also used participant observation in various venues, including four public toilets, and one team member joined a volunteer outreach group in order to build relationships with the target communities. A sample was then recruited from these social networks. However, unlike Humphreys, the researchers openly engaged with the participants about the project, its goals and the way the information they gave would be handled: ‘After briefing about the objectives of the study, informed consent was obtained from the participants, who were assured of confidentiality, the use of pseudonyms, and safe storage of the data’ (ibid.: 1482).
Considering the number of things that could go wrong in the research process, researchers today do not consider Humphreys’ methods to be legitimate. Funding bodies such as the European Science Foundation and the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), as well as universities, have much stricter ethical guidelines and codes of practice than in the past. It is unlikely that covert research involving the deception of subjects would be officially sanctioned today. Yet Humphreys was one of the first sociologists to study a hidden aspect of social life, and his account was a humane treatment of the subject going well beyond the existing stock of knowledge.
THINKING CRITICALLY
Read the first two chapters of Humphreys’ Tearoom Trade and list his reasons for carrying out covert research rather than being open with his subjects. Which aspects of social life today are so difficult to access that we may never understand them by adhering to today’s stricter research norms? On what grounds might a proposal for covert research be justified?
The issues that concern sociologists are often those that worry other people. After all, sociologists are members of society too. Good research should help us to understand social life better and, quite often, to view it in new ways. Tearoom Trade provdes good examples of the kind of questions that sociologists ask. In looking at the activities that occur in public toilets, Humphreys found that something we take to be obvious – a public toilet – is actually socially constructed, depending on how people use it. Social constructionism is a perspective which begins from the premise that social reality is the product of interactions between individuals and groups, not something to be taken as ‘natural’ (see chapter 12, ‘Social Interaction and Daily Life’, and chapter 5, ‘The Environment’). In this case, what most people believed to be a public building with an obvious function was, for a particular group, primarily a venue for the pursuit of sexual activity.
Studying society often brings surprising results and frequently runs counter to ‘common-sense’ beliefs. What do teenagers actually use their smartphones for? Have the circumstances of ethnic and sexual minorities in Canada improved over time? Why does large-scale poverty still exist in the USA alongside the immense personal wealth of a small minority? Why have many people across the European Union lost faith in conventional party politics? Sociologists try to provide answers to these and many other questions, but their determinations are by no means final, as society is always in a process of change and later research makes new findings. Nevertheless, it is the aim of theorizing and research to break away from speculation and to base our understanding on evidence. Good sociology makes its research questions as precise as possible and seeks to gather factual evidence before reaching general conclusions. To achieve these aims, we must select the most useful research methods to use for a given study and know how best to analyse the results.
Sociologists often ask empirical or factual questions. For example, what kinds of occupation and domestic arrangements are most common among MSM in public parks and toilets in China? What proportion of the participants do the police arrest? Even factual questions of this kind can be difficult to answer. There are no official statistics on sexual activity in tearooms, saunas and parks, for example. Similarly, official crime statistics have been found to be of dubious value in revealing the ‘real’ level of criminal activity in a society. Researchers who study crime say that police-recorded crime figures are just the visible tip of a much larger ‘iceberg’ of crime (Simmons and Dodds 2003). Indeed, some criminal actions may be seen by victims as purely private matters that are not ‘crimes’ at all (see chapter 22, ‘Crime and Deviance’, for a discussion of crime statistics).
Factual information about one national society will not tell us whether we are dealing with an unusual case or a more general set of social influences. Hence, sociologists often ask comparative questions, relating findings from one society to another social context or using contrasting examples drawn from different societies across the world. There are significant differences, for example, between the social and legal systems of Russia, Italy and South Korea. A typical comparative question might be: how much do patterns of criminal behaviour and law enforcement vary between these three countries? Answering this question might lead us to other questions, such as how did systems of law enforcement develop over time and how similar or different are the penal regimes in these countries?
In sociology, we need to compare not only contemporary societies but also the present and the past to gain a better understanding of social development. In this case we ask historical or developmental questions: how did we get from there to here? To understand the nature of the modern world, we have to look at previous forms of society and processes of social change. Thus we can investigate how the first prisons originated and what they are like today, tracing key periods or phases of change in this development. Doing so provides us with a good part of an explanation.
Sociological research is not just the collection of facts, however important and interesting they may be. It is a truism in sociology that ‘the facts don’t speak for themselves’;