When Marxists Do Research. by Pauline Marie VaillancourtReview by: Peter H. RossiSocial Forces, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Dec., 1987), pp. 591-592Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2578778 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 20:07

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Forces.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.250 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 20:07:50 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Book Reviews / 591

fatherhood across the life cycle that could be useful to both professionals and laypersons in many settings. A glossary of terms completes the book, providing a common frame of reference for those readers not familiar with all of the disciplines represented.

When Marxists Do Research. By Pauline Marie Vaillancourt. Greenuood, 1986. 205 pp. $29.95.

Reviewer: PETER H. ROSSI, University of Massachusetts

I agreed to undertake this review because I wanted to know how Marxists went about doing research, and on which topics they were doing it. The volume's title led me to assume that this book would contain that information. Alas, I was disap- pointed. There is no reference to any specific item of research in the entire vol- ume. The reader will not learn anything about how Marxists or anyone else goes about doing research, nor on what topics Marxist research is being done.

A more accurate title would be Marxist and Mainline Thinking about Research. My suggested title would not make the book any less valuable, for the topics the author actually takes up, and tests skillfully, are important ones. I do hope that she will someday consider doing the book that I would like to read concerning actual Marxist research.

Vaillancourt has written an analysis of how various types of Marxists regard social-science research, contrasting their views with those of "mainline" non- Marxists. She distinguishes among the several different Marxist strains: "philo- sophic," "structural," "deductivist," and "materialist." Only the materialists share enough in common with mainline social scientists to be able to undertake research that the latter could accept on epistemological and methodological grounds. Struc- turalists claim a determining priority for semi-mystical "structures" that are not knowable through direct observation or indirect manifestations. Deductivists are true believers, concerned with applying the ideas of Marx and Lenin and deducing from them the state of society and social relations. Philosophic Marxists believe that reality is not knowable directly and hence exalt the world of ungrounded theory. Materialists, in contrast, accept conventional ideas of measurement and causality, believe that the world is knowable through observation, and differ from mainline social scientists mainly in asserting that research must be value-oriented. It follows that the author's final section on the "value" of Marxist research asserts that non-Marxists will find the work of the materialists to be useful, but that the other varieties of Marxism depart so far from the basic assumptions of mainline social science as to be incomprehensible.

Not being familiar with the sources described, I cannot judge whether Vail- lancourt has been fair to each of the varieties of Marxism she discusses. I suspect, however, that her classification may be somewhat outdated. For example, there appear to be no Americans among the materialist Marxists cited, and very few are contemporary figures. There is no mention of Erik Olin Wright or Larry Griffin, to name only two of the best-known multivariate materialist Marxists. Some of her examples also do not jibe with my own knowledge: David Harvey, the Marxist geographer, is scarcely a structuralist, and has been known to undertake some

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.250 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 20:07:50 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

592 / Social Forces Volume 66:2, December 1987

mainline research. Perhaps the problem with Wright, Griffin, and Harvey is that they have actually undertaken research and not simply written about its meta- physical foundations.

Vaillancourt's book may be valuable to graduate students who are studying for their comprehensives. The Marxist domain is neatly partitioned and its several kinds of inhabitants clearly classified and described. If the reader wants to leam what Marxist social scientists study and how, this book is not an adequate guide.

Reliability and Validity in Qualitative Research. By Jerome Kirk and Marc L. Miller. Sage University Paper series on Qualitative Research Methods, Volume 1. Sage, 1986. 85 pp. Cloth, $10.95; paper, $6.00.

Speaking of Ethnography. By Michael H. Agar. Sage University Paper series on Qualitative Research Methods, Vol- ume 2. Sage, 1986. 78 pp. Cloth, $10.95; paper, $6.00.

The Politics and Ethics of Fieldwork. By Maurice Punch. Sage University Paper series on Qualitative Research Methods, Volume 3. Sage, 1986. 91 pp. Cloth, $10.95; paper, $6.00.

Linking Data. By Nigel G. Fielding and Jane L. Fielding. Sage University Paper series on Qualitative Research Methods, Volume 4. Sage, 1986. 95 pp. Cloth, $10.95; paper, $6.00.

Reviewer: TRUDY MILLS, University of Arizona

The contributors to these four volumes do not perpetuate the tiresome polemics about the superiority of qualitative or quantitative research. They are more prag- matic. They ask, how can we do better research?

Kirk and Miller suggest that qualitative researchers should be more con- cerned with "objectivity." They define objectivity as the "simultaneous realization of as much reliability and validity as possible." They argue that while "the forte" of qualitative research lies in its ability to "sort out the validity of propositions," researchers need to pay more attention to issues of reliability. The personalized, private, often unintelligible nature of fieldnotes and qualitative data analysis makes reliability checks difficult. Thus, they call for the conventionalization of fieldnotes, as well as the explicit recognition that qualitative research is a four-phase affair. For others to understand how a researcher made decisions (and to aid in that decision making), qualitative researchers should be explicit about: invention (research de- sign), discovery (data collection), interpretation (analysis), and explanation (docu- mentation).

Agar is not interested in the "conventional" scientific procedures outlined by Kirk and Miller, but he shares their interest in establishing a language to de- scribe and evaluate ethnographic research. Ethnography involves making action in one tradition coherent from the point of view of another. Thus, ethnography is neither objective nor subjective; it is, according to Agar, interpretive. To do eth- nography, researchers focus on differences (called breakdowns) that appear when

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.250 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 20:07:50 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions