Well, welcome back to Changemaker Q& A everyone. This is the podcast where we answer any questions related to all things social change. I’m Tiana Jay, your host and the founder of the Humanitarian Changemakers Network. I’m also a PhD student researching in the field of communication and social change.
And today’s question. is one that was asked about my research. And I love answering questions all about research because I love talking about not only the role of research in the role of social change, but also just more generally about how the way we Obtain knowledge, the way we consider what is and isn’t knowledge and how that informs our understanding of the world and reality kind of influences, the ways in which we ought to go about social change.
So today’s question comes from Dess who asks, how do you do a PhD in a topic? So subjective, as an industrial hygienist. Having to read so many scientific articles from research and a lot are so inconclusive. They basically say, use at your own risk or needs more research, et cetera. I can’t imagine researching about a word like empowerment.
Now this is a great question and it’s a really common question that I get asked about my research particularly online, particularly on platforms like TikTok. It’s generally not asked as much. By people within academic circles or communities, although I’m sure that there probably are a lot of people out there who may belong to the field of the so called natural sciences, who probably have this same view when it comes to anything in the social sciences or even the humanities and.
This is, you know, to no fault of their own, although I had a conversation recently with somebody and we were talking about how it’s kind of interesting that when you do a PhD and you’re doing research in a particular field, in a particular discipline, it doesn’t matter what field your research is in, it doesn’t matter what discipline you belong to, what department you’re a part of at your university, the degree that you get at the end is the same.
The doctorate degree is a philosophy doctorate, a doctorate of philosophy. That’s what the PhD stands for. And it’s really interesting to think about the fact that whether you are researching in the field of biomedical science, public health, psychology, anthropology, history. literature, it doesn’t matter what you’re studying, everybody’s getting a doctorate of philosophy, yet so many researchers are unfamiliar with the actual philosophies and the aspects of philosophy that underpin their research.
And this is something that goes, I think, really overlooked in the academy. And I think, and this person that I was talking to kind of agrees that there needs to be more of an emphasis for researchers on not only selecting an appropriate methodology or kind of talking about their, ontology or their epistemological approach in their research, but really actually understanding what these mean and the implications of these and not being afraid to challenge them within your field.
However, I could talk about this for so long I could do a whole nother episode. So if you do have any questions about anything I discuss in this episode, feel free to ask directly on the platform that you’re listening to if you are on Spotify or YouTube. Or you can head to the link in the description humanitarianchangemakers.
net forward slash podcast. You can ask your questions on there. You can ask anonymously or not. You can leave your details and we will send some Changemaker Co goodies to anybody whose question is answered on the pod. So with that said, let’s dive in to this question of subjective research and understanding subjective topics.
Now, I think there are a lot of misconceptions that we need to address first when it comes to these notions of so called subjectivity and objectivity. First of all, there’s a bit of an assumption in this question that was asked by Des about inconclusivity. And this idea that an inconclusive result is is a result of whether the research was…
either conducted subjectively or objectively, or about a subjective or objective phenomenon. In reality, inconclusive research findings can result from methodological challenges. so Things like having an inadequate sample size, having a flaw in the design of the study perhaps errors in measurement or analysis of the data.
And these issues compromise the reliability and the validity of the data in the research. And that is what can lead to ambiguous results. So when we use rigorous research methods and approaches. tHis is applied regardless of whether the research is what you might consider subjective or objective, and you can get inconclusive research results and findings from subjective or objective research if you don’t address these methodological challenges.
So I think it’s also important to touch on this idea that What people tend to maybe consider as subjective is probably better understood or conceptualized as being context dependent. So where Des has mentioned that they come across a lot of inconclusive results in the research that they read, this is probably more so reflective of the challenges of the research findings and the results only really being applicable in certain contexts.
It’s not really subjective if we consider the definition of subjective to be open to individual interpretations or experiences. When Des says that they’re subjective or inconclusive, what I think she is actually referring to is that the research findings are only applicable in a particular context.
And Anybody looking to apply these research findings needs to consider the fact that the context in which they are working may not be the same in which the context that the research was conducted in. And it kind of opens up this broader discussion about this idea that knowledge or research findings that are only context dependent aren’t necessarily any less valid than those that are not context dependent.
So You know. Maybe the people who were researching this particular thing went out with the intention of hoping to find some kind of results that could be applied by people in the industrial hygiene field across different contexts. And maybe they actually found after conducting their research that you can’t apply this particular hypothesis, this particular thing, whatever the object of the research was in different contexts.
It’s only applicable in the particular context that we studied. And that’s okay. The whole point of conducting that study is so that people can then say, okay, we can’t actually apply this across different contexts. And that opens up the opportunity for more research to be conducted to either explore this further.
Or look at alternative pathways. So, So if we think about the conclusiveness of our research being open to interpretation or correction, that’s a good thing. The very nature of human knowledge is that it should evolve as humanity evolves. It doesn’t make it any less valid if our research findings are context dependent or perhaps open to reinterpretation or correction.
correction in the future. Now, if we go back to this kind of original definition of subjectivity being that it is open to individual interpretation or experience, there are still lots of phenomena in the world that individuals experience subjectively. We could look at health, for example, health. Is a very subjectively experienced thing.
What I consider to look like health in my life is probably very different to what you might consider health looks like in your life. And we have different ideas of what we believe healthy is. We have different ways of experiencing different aspects of health, like exercise and diet and illness. How we approach health might also be dependent on the particular culture or context that we find ourselves in.
But that doesn’t mean health is inherently subjective. We can still research health from an objective standpoint. We can still develop certain indicators of health and develop standards and definitions and approaches to healthcare that are based on an objective analysis. that considers all of the subjective experiences or aspects that individuals might have within that.
It is possible to have both. I think it is actually necessary for a full or holistic conception of anything to include both. And this applies to any research in fields like human behavior and psychology, finance or economics, politics, ethics and justice, even history. People are always going to have subjective views of these things, or subjective experiences of these things.
Or they’re going to behave in a way that is context dependent, but we can still study these things objectively. And later in this episode, I am going to share my personal favorite framework for kind of conceptualizing how we can go about this. So, it’s important to distinguish between, I think, both the relative subjectivity or objectivity, of a phenomena itself and the way in which that thing is studied.
So, For example, my research looks at empowerment. Empowerment as a phenomenon can be experienced subjectively depending on an individual’s experience of it, but it can also be studied objectively. We can look at empowerment as an objective whole. At the same time, the approach to research, the research methodologies that are taken, might take a subjective or objective approach.
So the research methodologies might actually focus on capturing those individual experiences of empowerment. Or it might look at the individual experiences of empowerment from an objective perspective, and maybe that means using quantitative as opposed to qualitative data. So we can always distinguish between both the subjectivity and objectivity of a phenomena itself and the way in which we study it.
So. All of these kind of like misconceptions are really reflective of one of the biggest challenges I think we face when it comes to understanding reality and the world. And that is this problem of dualisms. This is a big problem. Particularly in contemporary Western ways of knowing and being of our epistemology and ontology to use the philosophical terms.
So I’ve mentioned this in our episode about systems thinking, I believe. And I definitely recommend checking out that episode because a lot of the concepts and things I discuss in this episode will reference systems thinking. So if you’re not familiar with what systems thinking is, definitely check that episode out.
But there’s a quote that I love from Vandana Shiva. Vandana Shiva is an Indian physicist, theoretical physicist. She’s an activist, an academic. And her work kind of sits, I think, at the intersection of both academia and activism. So I love that. It focuses both on theory and practice and she has this quote and I love and it says, we’ve moved from wisdom to knowledge and now we’re moving from knowledge to information and that information is so partial that we’re creating incomplete human beings.
I love that quote because I think it really captures some of the biggest problems that we face in academia today. And it can be traced all the way back to, I think, philosophers like Rene Descartes. Descartes and the impact of his philosophy was really pivotal in shaping our understanding of reality.
And Descartes is the guy who said, I think, therefore I am. And. That concept is fundamentally flawed, but he essentially led to what’s now called Cartesian dualism. And it was this split or this separation between different phenomena. So that saw the split that we now see in academia, things like theory versus practice, the micro versus the macro, subjectivity versus objectivity.
And even I guess the disciplinary splits that we see like the natural sciences versus the social sciences is another example. And these dualisms that we see really impact the way that we engage knowledge and obtain knowledge about the world and the way we understand the world. And the problem with dualisms is that They’re a misinterpretation of reality.
Dualisms are effective insofar as they allow us a lens through which we can understand reality. We can obtain information about something and knowledge. The problem is that we have a tendency to reduce reality to this knowledge when there is a bigger, broader, independent, objective reality out there.
And it’s a mistake to try and reduce this reality to what we currently know about that reality. And when we can accept this, we begin to recognize that these dualisms aren’t necessarily two competing phenomena or two competing things. They’re two sides of the same coin. The existence is intrinsically connected to and dependent on the other.
You cannot have the micro without the macro. You cannot have theory without practice. You cannot have subjectivity without objectivity. And vice versa. So, When we can kind of get past this need that we have to create these false dualisms about reality and our knowledge about reality, we can begin to understand things a little bit more holistically, and in a way that is a better reflection of how reality actually exists.
So… A little analogy that I like to use, I call this the puzzle analogy, I like to think of the different roles or responsibilities of researchers when it comes to, uh, constructing knowledge. So, the role of a PhD. candidate like myself, is to create, oh sorry, make an original contribution to knowledge. So the whole point of doing a PhD is that your research is supposed to discover, uncover something that is original, something that no one else has, uh, come to a conclusion about, and put that forth into the Ever changing, ever evolving, dynamic body of knowledge that comes from the academy.
And different researchers in different fields, using different methodologies in different disciplines, have different roles to play in this broader ecosystem of knowledge building. And I use the analogy of a puzzle. So, you could think of the three roles being focusing on a single piece of the puzzle.
the role of putting different puzzle pieces together, and then the role of looking at the puzzle as a whole. So, A researcher looking at a single piece of the puzzle is somebody who’s really honed in and focused on one particular thing. They’re going to be looking at things that are perhaps subjective.
They’re going to be analyzing. They’re going to be looking at events or experiences. They’re going to be either looking at the micro or the macro perspective. And they’re probably going to either… be within a single discipline or taking a multidisciplinary approach. A researcher whose role is putting puzzle pieces together is going to take a more intersubjective approach.
So an approach that instead of looking at individuals experiences of reality, it’s looking at the shared reality. individuals have. They might be using synthesis as opposed to analysis. They would probably be looking at broader patterns and trends as opposed to those individual events and experiences of the single puzzle piece.
They would be looking at the relationship between the micro and the macro, not necessarily choosing one or the other. And they would probably be taking an interdisciplinary approach. Then we have the whole puzzle. So a researcher whose job is to look at and make sense of the whole puzzle, or the whole puzzle so far, is probably one that is more objective.
You’re looking at both the individual subjective reality from those puzzle pieces and the intersubjective shared reality of individuals and their broader collectives. You’re probably doing what’s called a meta analysis. So, you’re analyzing the whole as opposed to an individual part. Rather than looking at the events and experiences of a single puzzle piece, or the patterns and trends that we see when we put the puzzle pieces together, they’re probably looking at the causes, the underlying causes that explain why something is the way that it is.
Rather than looking at the micro or the macro or looking at the relationship between these things, it will be looking at the whole. So it’s looking at the micro, the macro, and the relationship between them. And finally, it’s probably going to be transdisciplinary. So we’re looking at it in a way that transcends any of those disciplinary bounds.
So that’s my puzzle analogy. And it kind of explains that When researchers are obtaining and building knowledge, we play different roles. Sometimes we might play one role in an entire research project. Sometimes a single research project, we might take on all of these roles at some part. But generally, these are the three types of roles that researchers play when it comes to the building of knowledge.
The true nature of reality is that phenomena are incredibly complex and The true, I guess, understanding of these phenomena is going to be one that encompasses both the subjective and the objective, the micro and the macro theory and practice. It’s a mistake that has become, I think, so normalized in Western societies and through our knowledge systems to reduce.
complex phenomena to these individual things. Now, a tool that I think is really useful for anyone engaging in the social change space but also researchers or practitioners who might be looking at a complex phenomena and wanting to understand it a little bit more holistically and in a way that is more reflective of the true nature of that thing is the iceberg model.
So the iceberg model, is a heuristic model that is used in systems thinking. It’s based on the analogy that the majority of an iceberg is what sits below the surface and what we can’t see. And we only really see the top part of the iceberg, but the top part is where Empirical knowledge sits. So empirical knowledge encompasses both the subjective and objective.
It’s the events or the things that we can observe or measure, and it’s also the subjective or contextual experiences of people. So that sits in the very top part of the iceberg, in what is called the events. Under that, we have the patterns and the trends. So, this is where we begin to analyze or perhaps synthesize, and we start to notice patterns and trends, both between and across these different events or experiences that we can empirically observe and measure.
We can begin to ask questions like, what are some of the regularities that are occurring? What might this say about the true nature of this phenomenon beyond different contexts?
We can then go a little bit deeper, and we get below, like the surface of the water, and this is the underlying structures level of the iceberg. So, If we’re talking about social reality in the social world, this is where any kind of social relations or assemblages would go. Things like legislation, policy, procedures within a society, the social relations between a population.
If we’re looking at perhaps a hard system or a phenomena that exists in something like the environment maybe. We would be looking at the physical structure of that ecosystem. We would be looking at basically the things that the system is composed of and the relationships between those things.
Then we go a little bit further below to the bottom of the iceberg. And this is the mental models. So this would mostly only apply to any kind of like soft systems, but it can also apply to hard systems and. I like to think of mental models as culture, culture being those kind of intangible aspects of humans or humanity and human societies, its ideas, beliefs, values, philosophies, things like that, and really understanding what the mental models are in place is really critical.
These mental models in a soft or a social system and the structure. in a soft or a hard system are the things that tend to have causal power. So they’re the things that can explain the events that we’re observing or experiencing and all of those patterns and trends. So we can’t reduce reality to just those subjective and contextual or objective and empirical facts that we observe at the top of the iceberg, nor can we just reduce it to those patterns and trends.
We need to go deeper and we need to take a holistic view that looks at all of these levels. We’re looking at the events, we’re looking at the patterns and trends, but we’re also looking at those underlying structures or mental models that might have causal So to use the example of empowerment, which is what my research focuses on, In the context of using ICTs in rural development interventions.
I’ll illustrate this with the iceberg model. So at the top level of the iceberg, we have the events and the experiences. So what this involved for me was. using both existing data from the organizations that I’m working with, a lot of quantitative data and through the focus group discussions that I had with participants, really trying to capture both their individual experiences of empowerment, how they defined empowerment in their different communities and as individuals and comparing and contrasting that.
And what you kind of then get is that next level of patterns and trends and you can begin to kind of see that yes, even though individual women have individual experiences of empowerment, the ways in which they define empowerment, the things that actually empowered them can be categorized into these categories or put into Thank you.
groups of similar things. And we begin to notice that there are regularities. We then go a little bit deeper. And this is my role as a researcher to kind of analyze all of the structures and the mental models that are actually holding the system in place. So the things that might explain the patterns and the trends that we can notice.
So this is looking at things like. The caste system in India, all of the different laws and policy that have shaped the different contexts that the participants find themselves in. So looking at India from independence all the way to now. Looking at the things that influence the strategies and approaches that are taken by the development organizations I was working with.
So looking at global development agendas, the sustainable development goals, the predecessors of the Millennium Development Goals, how they influence. The approaches taken by these organizations, how state level or national level or regional policy and procedures, legislation, all of the goals that have been set how they influence what’s happening.
And then what you get at the end is essentially this very holistic view. of empowerment that encompasses both the subjective individual experiences of individual women, their shared reality as larger communities, and the more objective view that looks at the events. That we can observe and measure. It looks at the patterns and the trends, and it looks at the underlying causal.
So anything that is causally efficacious within the structures or the mental models. And that holistic thing, that whole puzzle, that iceberg is essentially how we get A more objective, more holistic understanding of a concept that can seem incredibly subjective. And this can be done not just with empowerment in my research, but in any field.
It can be done in, like, literally any other discipline. And that is what the role of research is. It’s… Both looking at those individual puzzle pieces that might fit at any level of that iceberg model. It’s synthesizing and kind of drawing those connections and looking at how different components relate to other components.
And it’s also looking at those kind of underlying causes that can explain what we’re seeing at those other levels. So, I hope this answers the question. I hope this answers any of your questions that you might have had about how we can, I guess, obtain knowledge about subjective phenomena and how we can utilize that in a more effective way.
If you have any questions about anything I discussed in this episode, I would love you to ask them. There are no dumb questions. Even when a question like Dez’s question has a lot of misconceptions or assumptions underpinning it, it’s not a dumb question, it’s not a bad question, it’s quite reflective of kind of broader challenges that we need to deal with as changemakers.
In order to understand and intervene in the social world a little bit more effectively. So, if you enjoyed this episode, I always leave a link in the description to the episode show notes. In the episode show notes, I summarize the whole episode in an article. I include useful diagrams and things like that.
And I also include the episode transcript for anybody who would like to read the episode. So definitely check that out. You can see the iceberg model and things like that. If you enjoyed the episode, it would really mean a lot to me and the team. If you gave us a review or a five star rating on the podcast platform that you’re listening to, or a thumbs up on YouTube, it really helps us kind of see the type of content that people like, and also helps us get the content out there to more people as an independent podcast.
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And I look forward to connecting with you all and seeing all of the wonderful things that you are doing in your communities or online to make change happen.
