Thanks for the responses James, I found them thoughtful and helpful!
A few responses in return:
On your point regarding the methodology you would use to answer these questions, I would definitely be interested to hear more about that as I’ll be finalising my research methodology over January.
Quick thoughts:
Partly it’s just that I don’t have a quant background, and so of necessity I would take a qualitative approach. I think for some questions, this would also be the most appropriate approach (to give a straw example, I’m sceptical about measuring broad social change by quantitative analysis of words used in searchable databases of newspaper articles, versus reading a whole bunch of different sources of evidence, and reaching a qualitative conclusion)
As implied in my comment, I’m reasonably sceptical of theoretical models of social change. Partly this is just my historian’s socialisation. I’d be pretty surprised if many (any?) of these models had high predictive power, and I worry that they miss important nuance. So I’d probably not pay much attention to them if I were doing this research.
I also note that you seem to me to have started from ‘this thing (mass movement protests) seems maybe really effective! What research can we do to dis/confirm this?’ I would be more likely to start from ‘there’s a gap in what we’re trying to do. What might fill that gap?‘, or from ‘there are a lot of past examples of people doing the thing we’re thinking of doing. What can we learn from that?’
To pin down my thinking a bit more, this is vaguely it: I believe public opinion is quite important for social change → Mass movements can be useful tools to build public support → Protests can be a cost-effective way of building public support and building a mass movement.
Thanks for clarifying. One thing I’ll note is that this is a multi-stage hypothesis, so you have to be right about quite a few different things for this to end up mattering.
I think you’re right in that I haven’t been very clear on what my proposed intervention is e.g. incubate a new movement vs organise protests vs a mass movement not focused on protest. That is something I’ll definitely try clarify in future research but partly I think this is due to my own uncertainty on this topic which makes it hard to pin down.
When you put it like this, I think it’s definitely legit and in fact wise not to have pinned down your proposed intervention: after all, you haven’t done the research yet, and might discover things which update your current guesses in important ways. Sorry for not getting this before, and implying that you should already know the answer here!
Could I just check if you have any examples of what you would consider empirical social movement studies vs theoretical? As my initial hunch is that most of that work would fit into the theoretical categories but wondering if I’m drawing my boundaries different to you e.g. would conclusions from a very detailed case study be empirical or theoretical?
I guess most things have aspects of both theory (~statements about how stuff works in general) and empirics (~statements about particular stuff that’s happened). A few different ways of gesturing at what I personally mean here:
Some types of theory fit my intellectual tastes; others don’t. When someone, after showing me a bunch of evidence, says ‘this evidence suggests that x tends to happen because of y’, that feels good to me: I know what evidence to use to assess the claim, and the claim is reasonably specific. When someone presents me with a complicated model of change (x influences y but also z can cause all of it if and only if in the presence of a), I feel a bunch more sceptical: the model is actually still qualitative masquerading as quantitate, it’s claiming a lot and so it’s difficult to assess and disentangle, and a lot of separate things would need to be right for the model to be right.
Speaking from the (relatively few) works of sociology I’ve read relating to social movements, I like the stuff which focuses on empirical explanation of particular social movements (e.g. this is what happened when foot-binding stopped in China) more than I like the stuff which focuses on engaging with theoretical models that come up elsewhere in the literature (e.g. here is our contribution to the concept of political opportunity structure).
Thanks for the responses James, I found them thoughtful and helpful!
A few responses in return:
Quick thoughts:
Partly it’s just that I don’t have a quant background, and so of necessity I would take a qualitative approach. I think for some questions, this would also be the most appropriate approach (to give a straw example, I’m sceptical about measuring broad social change by quantitative analysis of words used in searchable databases of newspaper articles, versus reading a whole bunch of different sources of evidence, and reaching a qualitative conclusion)
As implied in my comment, I’m reasonably sceptical of theoretical models of social change. Partly this is just my historian’s socialisation. I’d be pretty surprised if many (any?) of these models had high predictive power, and I worry that they miss important nuance. So I’d probably not pay much attention to them if I were doing this research.
I also note that you seem to me to have started from ‘this thing (mass movement protests) seems maybe really effective! What research can we do to dis/confirm this?’ I would be more likely to start from ‘there’s a gap in what we’re trying to do. What might fill that gap?‘, or from ‘there are a lot of past examples of people doing the thing we’re thinking of doing. What can we learn from that?’
Thanks for clarifying. One thing I’ll note is that this is a multi-stage hypothesis, so you have to be right about quite a few different things for this to end up mattering.
When you put it like this, I think it’s definitely legit and in fact wise not to have pinned down your proposed intervention: after all, you haven’t done the research yet, and might discover things which update your current guesses in important ways. Sorry for not getting this before, and implying that you should already know the answer here!
I guess most things have aspects of both theory (~statements about how stuff works in general) and empirics (~statements about particular stuff that’s happened). A few different ways of gesturing at what I personally mean here:
Some types of theory fit my intellectual tastes; others don’t. When someone, after showing me a bunch of evidence, says ‘this evidence suggests that x tends to happen because of y’, that feels good to me: I know what evidence to use to assess the claim, and the claim is reasonably specific. When someone presents me with a complicated model of change (x influences y but also z can cause all of it if and only if in the presence of a), I feel a bunch more sceptical: the model is actually still qualitative masquerading as quantitate, it’s claiming a lot and so it’s difficult to assess and disentangle, and a lot of separate things would need to be right for the model to be right.
Speaking from the (relatively few) works of sociology I’ve read relating to social movements, I like the stuff which focuses on empirical explanation of particular social movements (e.g. this is what happened when foot-binding stopped in China) more than I like the stuff which focuses on engaging with theoretical models that come up elsewhere in the literature (e.g. here is our contribution to the concept of political opportunity structure).