From Consensus to Crystallization of Truths: A Social Journalism Approach
Several years ago I took a course in cross-cultural psychology at the New School University. For our first class, we gathered on a bright September’s afternoon in a sunny room in Chelsea, Lower Manhattan, and played a card game.
That’s right, a card game. The teacher, Laurie Paul, divided us — about 16 students — into small groups and gave each of us a sheet with game rules. We memorized them, and when she collected the flyers, she asked that we keep the rules to ourselves. We used standard French playing card decks.
Ten minutes into the game, things started to look really weird. The other students I was playing with were not following the rules. And apparently we were all thinking the same thing about one another. Soon we began gazing around the room with puzzled faces, looking for answers.
Our teacher, meanwhile, was watching from the sidelines, amused. Her experiment must have once again proven very effective.
She had done something brilliant. She had given each of us a different set of rules, demonstrating that we should not assume that in a society, especially a multicultural one, we’re all playing the same game. Nor that the rules we normally go by will work just as well outside our environment.
We make those assumptions when we don’t understand that we operate within societal histories, frameworks of experience, cultural norms, socio-economic groups, linguistic traditions, religious backgrounds, you name it. In other words, we function according to default settings that make our experience of the world very subjective. We have different truths. (No, they’re not alternative facts.)
The problem is that we’re often so immersed in our own narratives — especially if they’re culturally dominant — that we don’t fully realize how they shape the way we relate to and perceive others.
And that’s the best way I can translate into simple language, and bring into my personal sphere, some of what Dr. Lisbeth Berbary shared with our social journalism class at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, at CUNY this week. Dr. Berbary is an associate professor of applied health sciences at the University of Waterloo, Canada, and an expert in humanist qualitative research, the interpersonal, language-based branch of scientific inquiry.
She developed a “scaffolding of qualitative inquiry,” an original approach to both doing research and representing its findings that incorporates more people’s experiences and helps to not “marginalize the outliers,” she explained via Skype.
Could the method be helpful to journalists? I think so, if the goal is more representative, nuanced and unique reporting that builds trust, elevates new voices and introduces new realities. That’s also the participatory philosophy behind social journalism. Dr. Carrie Brown, the director of the social journalism program at the school put it this way on Medium.
“We are pretty damn good at holding powerful institutions accountable to the public, and we should absolutely keep doing that. But we haven’t done as good of a job understanding citizens’ needs and perspectives from the bottom up — especially those citizens who have the least power in our society.”
The program has been introducing a range of activities and disciplines — community organizing, ethnography, social psychology, pioneers in new ways of fostering dialogue in communities in conflict — that expand the journalistic mindset outside its normal practices, writes Dr. Brown.
From Dr. Berbary’s perspective, journalists, like qualitative researchers, can accomplish more rigorous work by acknowledging their subjectivity (that card game). She calls it understanding how we are “epistemologically situated” so we can shift from reflecting the truth that originates from the status quo to a “crystalized paradigm of truth.” The latter captures representations of our complex world in ways that convey with authenticity more than one lived reality.
“We are the tool,” she writes about the role of qualitative researchers in her 2016 Interview Workshop, which can apply to journalists as well. “We are the filter through which all data passes.” Separating ourselves from our default is practically impossible anyway, she argues, since even if we did, the world around us would still see us through the labels and the categories that it thinks fit us.
Dr. Berbary’s work utterly fascinates me; I will have to read the materials she shared with our class over and over to fully process her teachings. But here are some of her suggestions I would like to incorporate into the interviewing process when I go out in my community of malemployed immigrants in New York City — newcomers who arrived in the U.S. with college degrees or higher, but end working in jobs for which they’re overqualified or overeducated or both.
- Be “transparent” about how you are socially situated (remember the card game), your expectations, your experiences. “Revealing subjectivities, makes the reader aware of the filter,” she says.
- Construct open-ended questions in the participants’ language.
- Begin your questions with “what,” “how” or “when,” and avoid words like “affect, determine or prove,” which are more typical of an objective, not subjective, approach.
- Look for answers that are “thick, storied descriptions,” recommends Dr. Berbary, by asking “Tell me” as you start the conversation.
The shift we are seeking, says the scholar, is to do “research with people, not on people.” It helps to immerse ourselves in their world and understand how they are epistemologically situated. “You have to be that, which you want to see in the world,” she says.
Note: Laurie Paul, PhD LLC, is a psychologist in private practice in Maryland.