Parts of a Path: A Different Approach to the Empirical Method in the Research of Elite Schooling in Jordan

I’m a creature of habit.  We all are. Routines, routines, routines.  Every morning I wake up, shower, brush my teeth, comb my hair, and set out for breakfast.  Every week I go to my classes at the same time, work my jobs at the same time, and relax at the same time. We live in a world of routines, of patterns.   And more than just governing our time in life, they govern our thoughts as well. The thought pattern.

I’m writing this blog to explore what happens when one of these thought patterns is disrupted.  I was in elementary school when I first learned about the “scientific method.” Observe, form a question, form a hypothesis, collect data, analyze the data, draw conclusions.  In that order. Later in my educational career, I’d learn that this thought pattern was a constituent member of a larger thought pattern, Empiricism, which wasn’t limited solely to the natural sciences.  Observe, induct to form a hypothesis, deduct through data collection, analyze, and draw conclusions, in that order, was a method of thought that could be applied to the study of human behavior and interaction as well.  This variety of Empiricism is what sociological research relies on. As a researcher of an elite school in Jordan then, I am engaging in the thought pattern of Empiricism.

But something wasn’t right when I started this research.  The pattern was off. I had the data already in front of me.  I’d skipped the observation and formulation of a hypothesis, and been asked to backtrack in the pattern of the empirical method in order to compensate. The instructions were to look at the data, then come up with a question for research, then go back to the data. This is where we are in the project now, going back to the qualitative data. We are doing this to identify how the Westernized curriculum at Olive Grove Academy in Jordan shapes student outcomes. In the process, I’ve had to reflect on the way in which our method has informed our view of the data. The big question is simply, are we making the data fit to what we thought we saw in it initially? Am I begging the question?

This anxiety is a product of not having been the researchers gathering the data.  As a consequence of the path we’ve taken in our research, I’ve been unable to directly pose the research question we formulated to our research subjects.  The closest I can come is relying on cues in the data. For instance, the question “What are your plans for after senior year, after graduating?” asked of a student bears a direct relationship to that students imagined future.  The problem of fitting data to a narrative is not an issue in cases like this, where the question asked and the response generated is almost synonymous with our research question. For example, I can code the response of the interviewee in this case, “mostly leaning toward liberal art schools,” as “Type of higher education.”  

Where the problem of retrofitting data comes into play is in analyzing the wide range of data that doesn’t have an easily identifiable correlation to our research question, but may hold important sociological themes.  I’ll take the Bourdieusian concept of capital as an example. In that it helps to identify what social groups and institutions a person are accepted into, it bears an outweighed relation to our research on where students end up going after their time at an elite preparatory school.  However, where student relationships to their cultural, economic, and social capital are apparent in the data on Olive Grove is oftentimes isolated from the data directly dealing with our research question. For example, in a response from an interviewee such as “Yeah I mean we can afford like two cars, but they can’t be two supercars or like we don’t have you know… yeah,” the amount of economic capital a student has is evident, but it bears no surface-level relationship with their imagined future.  Capital theory suggests, however, that the economic capital a student possesses has everything with where a student imagines their future, and so when I code I feel the need to try and make this perceived connection clear. Because of this bias, my code for this response inevitably works towards justifying my own analysis. I must be dynamic in my analysis, in order to determine where actual sociological phenomena is an explanation of what is illustrated in the data, and where I am attempting to explain unrelated data by borrowing sweeping concepts like Bourdieu’s capital.

I think the resolution for this issue is found in the disruption of the thought pattern that caused it.  Because we have not taken the traditional route through the empirical method, our approach must be a dynamic path.  Instead of collecting data based on a question in order to analyze it, I must use a preliminary analysis to gauge the usefulness of the data that we have been given based on its relevance to our hypothesis.  For this research project, I’m placing faith in the strength of the parts of the empirical method, not the path that those parts are ascribed to take. Still a thought pattern, still a routine, but in a different order.  For this project, I’m combing my hair before I brush my teeth, but the routine still will end with a finished product that, hopefully, is ready to take on the world (or at least breakfast in the dining hall).