filled with questions about the validity, motivation, and limits of my project. What am I doing studying urban youth? Who am I to study them? What are they telling me? How will I represent their stories? Will I get it “right,” and what is the truth? During the same time, I was a doctoral student in psychology, passionately immersed in the academic worlds of feminist, postmodernist, and hermeneutic theory. The perspectives advanced in these theories, loosely representing what Paul Rabinow and William Sullivan term “the interpretive turn in the social sciences,”1 allowed me to eventually answer my gnawing questions. They offered me a window of clarity in the midst of my confusion. Feminist theory and postmodern thought, in particular, provided me with ways to make sense of my research project that resonated with my own perspectives on the world. They influenced not only how I conceived the project, but also how I analyzed the interview data, and ultimately, depicted the teens in this book. For this reason, it is critical for me to describe, over the next few pages, the beliefs held within this interpretive turn that shaped both the form and content of my study. Laying out the theoretical framework of my study is essential for understanding the teens’ stories that follow.
Form
Objectivity?
Criticizing the objective ideal in the social sciences, Rabinow and Sullivan write:
There is no outside, detached standpoint from which to gather and present brute data. When we try to understand the cultural world, we are dealing with interpretations, and interpretations of interpretations. Culture—the shared meanings, practices, and symbols that constitute the human world—does not present itself neutrally or with one voice, it is always multi-vocal … and both the observer and the observed are always enmeshed in it. … There is no privileged position, no absolute perspective, no final recounting.2
Like all other researchers, I came into my research on urban teens with a set of expectations and beliefs—a history, a gender, a race, a language, and a culture—that influenced how I understood and interpreted their stories. My stance as a researcher could not have been objective because I was not able to withdraw from my own perspective. In contrast to the beliefs characteristic of a more positivistic scientific tradition, the beliefs maintained within the interpretive turn assert that reality is not fixed and cannot be observed uninfluenced by the observer.3
Beginning with Schleiermacher in the early nineteenth century, various philosophers and psychologists have put forth theories making reference to a “hermeneutic circle.” This “hermeneutic circle” centers on the idea that “understanding inevitably involves reference to that which is already known.”4 My study rests on the assumption, for better or worse, that we can never escape such a circle of interpretation. When we try to understand a new phenomenon, we are always coming into it with expectations and preconceptions. Furthermore, what we already know, or our pre-understanding, is itself not an unmediated knowledge of the empirical world but determined by the traditions and symbolic codes within which we live and which shape our lives and ways of making sense of it. Once this dialectical nature of understanding has been recognized, the illusion of a completely detached stance as a researcher is exposed as such. The belief in an absolutely blank mind—a mind without any biases, prejudices, or pre-understandings—is a powerful trope or figure for scientific research but an untenable research tool.
One outcome of this questioning of objectivity is that generalizations and universals that surpass the boundaries of culture, time, and region become suspect. As the feminist psychologists Carol Gilligan, Lyn Mikel Brown, and Annie Rogers have pointed out: “How can sex [or class, race, or culture] be a difference that makes no difference?”5 Experience, perception, or ways of speaking cannot be decontextualized, taken out of culture, time, and place. To discuss how a person speaks about her or his world means to take into account and understand that these experiences are intimately connected to her or his specific location in the world.
One of the problems in the existing research literature on various populations of adolescents is that researchers frequently infer or explicitly state that what they have discovered from their data is the “objective truth” and that their findings can, therefore, be generalized to larger populations. The implicit and explicit denials by researchers of their lenses and biases often lead to distorted and misguided conclusions about the researched population. A striking example of such problematic conclusions is the “deficit model” of development used by many social scientists, which assumes deficiency or pathology when a particular population is different from what is typically a middle-class norm.6 For example, ethnic-minority parents are often blamed for not instilling in their children the “right” (i.e., white, middle-class) educational values.7 This deficit belief system, however, is rarely made explicit in the actual description of the research, and consequently the findings appear “objective.” Employing this stance of objectivity, social science researchers have been able to maintain that urban populations are deficient or pathological because these populations appear deficient or pathological according to these unacknowledged biases. The alternative hypothesis has only recently begun to be explored—namely, that researchers have obtained certain results because they have worked within a deficit framework rather than within a culturally specific normative framework.
Biases and Expectations: What Do We Do with Them ?
Recognizing that research always reflects the perspectives, ideals, and biases of the researchers need not lead to chaos or nihilistic indeterminacy. Biases allow researchers to maintain order and structure and gain access to meaning. In short, they allow us to avoid chaos. Prejudices are commonly perceived to inhibit truth-finding rather than to enhance it.8 However, biases and prejudices are necessary for understanding. They allow us to take in and engage with the world.9 Biases offer a perspective, and only through having a perspective can we see and possibly understand the vantage points of others.
But what are the implications of such beliefs? Since we always have biases, and, in fact, need biases to perceive different perspectives, what does this mean for researchers? I believe, along with many feminist researchers, that researchers should constantly evaluate and reevaluate their biases, assumptions, and expectations.10 It is when prejudices are not reflected upon, and as far as possible, acknowledged in research that one is likely to end up with findings that do not accurately represent the research participants’ views or perspectives.11 Hans-Georg Gadamer, holding similar views, states: “Every textual interpretation must begin then with the interpreter’s reflection on the preconceptions which result from the ’hermeneutical situation’ in which he finds himself. He must legitimate them, that is, look, for their origin and adequacy.”12 Instead of trying to “forget” one’s biases, prejudices, or expectations, one should engage with and challenge such biases and assumptions and determine their validity and limitations. In order to assess the “adequacy” of one’s biases, it is critical to maintain an openness toward the views held by the participants. Such an openness involves raising questions such as: Are the views held by the interviewee consistent or inconsistent with my expectations? If they are inconsistent, what are the implications for my own preconceptions or understandings? Gadamer warns us:
When we listen to someone or read a text, we discriminate from our own standpoint, among the different possible meanings—namely, what we consider possible—and we reject the remainder which seems to us unquestionably absurd. … We are naturally tempted to sacrifice, in the name of “impossibility,” everything that we totally fail to integrate into our system of anticipations. … [However] the essence of questioning is to lay bare and keep alert for possibilities.13
For sound and meaningful interpretations, it is necessary for the “open” reader to remain receptive to interpretations that at first glance seem “impossible,” “absurd,” or unexpected.
