Statistical Practice: Putting Society on Display

Michael Mair,Christian Greiffenhagen,W.W Sharrock

doi:10.1177/0263276414559058

Abstract

As a contribution to current debates on the ‘social life of methods’, in this article we present an ethnomethodological study of the role of understanding within statistical practice. After reviewing the empirical turn in the methods literature and the challenges to the qualitative-quantitative divide it has given rise to, we argue such case studies are relevant because they enable us to see different ways in which ‘methods’, here quantitative methods, come to have a social life – by embodying and exhibiting understanding they ‘make the social structures of everyday activities observable’ ( Garfinkel, 1967 : 75), thereby putting society on display. Exhibited understandings rest on distinctive lines of practical social and cultural inquiry – ethnographic ‘forays’ into the worlds of the producers and users of statistics – which are central to good statistical work but are not themselves quantitative. In highlighting these non-statistical forms of social and cultural inquiry at work in statistical practice, our case study is an addition to understandings of statistics and usefully points to ways in which studies of the social life of methods might be further developed from here.

Highlights

Stemming from a growing interest in the ‘social life of method’ (Law et al, 2011; Savage, 2013; and for a more general overview see MairTheory, Culture & Society 33(3)et al, 2013), studies of the emergence, contestation, stabilization, proliferation and collapse of new methods and their diverse social, cultural and political implications have been used to challenge a series of methodological orthodoxies allegedly definitive of the social sciences since the mid-20th century (Savage and Burrows, 2007)
Studies of statistical practice exemplify many of the issues we find in the wider literature on methods
We have presented two examples of the ways in which ‘the social structures of everyday activities’ are exhibited in and through statistical work: via, firstly, displayed understandings of the social and cultural contexts – the everyday social and cultural worlds that statisticians are members of – within which databases as numerical artifacts are produced; and, secondly, displayed understandings of the users of, and uses to which, statistical models may be put

Summary

Introduction

Stemming from a growing interest in the ‘social life of method’ The problem of understanding ‘fellow-workers’ can be acute, involving them in ‘doing, recognizing and using ethnographies’ (Garfinkel, 1967: 10) in related though distinct ways to that discussed in the previous section Alongside their ethnographic forays into the social, cultural and technical production of statistical data, statisticians have to develop an understanding of those who would use the outcomes of their work in order to understand the sets of relevancies, often quite different to their own, within which their work might find a place or fit. Orienting to others in the production of statistical ‘accounts’ points to another less visible ‘Winchean’ way in which understandings of ‘social structure’ are put on display in the statistician’s work, as well as the different kinds of social and cultural investigation it is developed through

Conclusion

Methods