Interpreting Data
Our reading over the last couple weeks, Pressed for Time by Judy Wajcman, looks at the relationship between technological changes and people’s understanding of time and connections. It was a sociological work and as we talked about in class this meant it was missing those personal narratives that move beyond the numbers — that rich qualitative analysis we love so much in Anthropology. While i think including more of this would have been great and might have allowed her to explore more diverse experiences of people, this post isn't really about the book. What i want to talk about is how we understand and use data.
Recently Sally Merry, an anthropology professor at NYU School of Law, held a talk with our anthropology department where she talked about the biases involved in the data collection process. From the development of the research question to the collection of the data through the exporting and interpretation of this information — power dynamics and institutional structures guide the way. For example, she talked about the UN attempting to measure violence against women but brought up some obvious questions which we could probably come up with in class, such as - is what’s considered violence the same for different peoples? or, what are the different social meanings of “violence” in these communities? You also have to consider the organization behind the measurement — what are their goals? where do they come from? who is this data for? The infrastructure of measurement is incredibly complicated and when the UN says that a certain percentage of women worldwide have “experienced violence” or when they use certain data points to assess a countries “development” this information then establishes a narrative and labels people and experiences one thing or another and affects how institutions and people understand and interact with those things. To bring it back to the impact of technology, look at the graph below.
Is what’s considered a “friend” different in relation to the internet? how does the age of the internet user affect their understanding of these changes? How much are these answers influenced by what people think the internet does vs what’s really happening? There’s a bunch of questions about the structure of this question and to what degree these statistics reflect reality. My point isn't that all measurements are useless or that violence against women isn't a very real and pervasive problem around the world. My point is that, just as we have broken down the biases involved in the “scientific process” we should be careful to what degree we establish narratives about change solely relying on measurements without contextualizing that information. With data collection becoming more and more important and accessible in the digital age finding ways to synthesize quantitative and qualitative knowledge is going to be all the more important in understanding the world around us.
