This blog has moved to WordPress.

Sorry Blogger. It's been good, it's been fun. You were my first, and that is always special. I tried to live with your imprefections, adapt, adjust, but, in the end, maybe we just aren't meant for each other. I am taking Farago with me and going off to explore a MisWritings on wordpress.com - another version of the same bibliographical effort. I feel good about it - the name fits (better than the blogger MisWritings version), the interface is similar, but wordpress has categories and that, that is what has won me over. It's time for new and exciting things. Good bye :).

Gender & Relationships - E. Maccoby

Maccoby, E. (1990) Gender and relationships: A developmental account. American Psychologist, v43(4) 513-520

Abstract: This article argue that behavioral differentiation of the sexes is minimal when children are observed or tested individually. Sex differences emerge primarily in social situations, and their nature varies with the gender composition of dyads and groups. Children find same-sex play partners more compatible, and they segregate themselves into same-sex groups, in which distinctive interaction styles emerge. These styles are described. As children move into adolescence, the patterns they developed in their childhood same-sex groups are carried over into cross-sex encounters in which girls' styles put them at a disadvantage. Patterns of mutual influence can become more symmetrical in intimate male-female dyads, but the distinctive styles of the two sexes can still be seen in such dyads and are subsequently manifested in the roles and relationships of parenthood. The implications of these continuities are considered.

Main points:
This article points out the failings of the "individual differences" perspective with respect to gender studies. There has been a great volume of work in this area but the end result remains relatively thin and somewhat inconclusive. Maccoby points out that this is because the "individual differences" perspective does not account for the social aspect of gender enactment. She also provides some interesting, now well known evidence for this:

1. When children were observed and assessed in terms of individual differences, there was no overall sex difference in the amount of social behavior. However, once each behavior was evaluated when taking into account the social situation - i.e. the gender of the partner with whom the child was playing - children of each sex had much higher levels of social behavior when playing with a same-sex partner than when playing with a child of the other sex. In fact, children as young as four have been observed to indicate not only awareness of gender similarity or difference, but also wariness toward the other sex (see Wasserman & Stern, 1978).

2. The number of times the child simply stood passively watching the partner play was also scored in one of Maccoby's studies. They found no OVERALL sex difference in the frequency of this behavior. However, the behavior of girls was affected by the sex of the partner. With other girls, passive behavior rarely occured. In fact in girl-girl pairs this behavior occurred LESS than in boy-boy pairs. BUT when girls were paired with boys, girls very often let boys monopolize the toys. SO it wasn't that the girls were just generally more passive than boys, but there was a social interaction that brought this type of behavior.
this is important - this means that when considering dyadic friendship pairs it is very important to look at the interaction of partner gender categories
3. Another study illustrated that gender preferences, in fact, preferences for same-sex partners was evident as early as 4 years of age and increased substantially as time progressed (final measurement at 6.5)
There is also evidence that not only is gender-segregation a widespread phenomenon in nearly all cultures where children are permitted a choice. Sex differences in performance are present or much larger when social situations are taking into account than when they are simply considered as individual differences. AND the preference for same sex partners is actually very difficult to change in children. This gender segregation is spontaneous and observed in situations that are less rather than more structured by adults. These sex preferences do not seem to be linked to gender-typed activities, but the preference persisits and can be observed at a very high level in children as old as 11.

Why does this happen?
1. boys seem to be more oriented towards rough-and-tumble play and issues of competition and dominance. These aspects of interaction are consistently observed in male-male pairs.
2. girls find it difficult to influence boys. Between ages 3 and 5 children greately increase the frequency with which they try to influence their pay partners - it is a learning process of social coordination (see Serbin, Sprafkin, Elman & Doyle, 1984). The latter study found that while girls attempt to influence through making suggestions, while boys try to influence in the form of direct demands and responded less and less to suggestions.
While girls' influence style was effective with each other and with teachers and adults, it was less and less effective with boys. These findings were replicated in studies of 33-month-old children (2.5-3 yrs old)

Why this happens? Despite all the research we do not know. Yes we can use cultural explanations or social influence and reinforcement explanations. But these differences occur far too early for these explanations to really hold. We might have to admit here that we don't know.
hmm interesting, this is a pointer to some kind of evolutionary genetic coding above all else. i wonder...

the article goes on to make a number of other fascinating observations related to youth and adults, supporting a similar thesis. most important for me - look at gender/partner interactions when talking about closeness and support because changes in comm styles can differ in same-sex and cross-sex dyads!

Sex Differences in Distress: Real or Artifact?

by J. Mirowsky & C. Ross
from American Sociological Review. 1995 Jun. Vol 60(3) 449-468 (Source: JSTOR)

Abstract:"Women report greater distress than men, but do women genuinely experience greater distress, suggesting a heavier burden of hardship and constraint? Or do they merely report the feelings in standard indexes more frequently? Perhaps women discuss their emotions more freely. Or perhaps the indexes tap "feminine" emotions such as depression rather than "masculine" ones such as anger. This study analyzes data from a 1990 U.S. sample of 1,282 women and 749 men. Results show that men keep emotions to themselves more than women, and that women express emotions more freely than men. However, these factors do not explain the effect of sex on reported levels of distress--an effect that remains significant with adjustment for these factors. Our results also contradict the idea that the sex difference in distress would diminish if the indexes of distress contained more items that tap anger. Adjusting for emotional reserve and expressiveness, women experience anger more often than men, as they do sadness, anxiety, malaise, and aches. In fact, being female has twice the effect on the frequency of anger that it has on the frequency of sadness. Women report feeling happy as often as men, but adjusting for emotional expressiveness reveals a negative effect of being female on happiness. Overall, women experience distress about 30 percent more often than men. We discuss the possibility that drug abuse and heavy drinking mask male distress, but find little evidence that those behaviors ameliorate distress. We conclude that women genuinely suffer more distress than men."

Discussion: Although the finding that women tend to report higher levels of depression than men, is persistently common in social science, several arguments have been advanced to explain this phenomenon. This article explores three explanations of this effect: structured-strain a view they favor and two competing hypotheses response-bias view and gendered-response theory. They find that the two competing hypotheses do not account for the finding, suggesting that the structured-strain view is more likely to be a reasonable explanation for the phenomenon. Although this approach through elimination of alternatives rather than direct testing of the original hypothesis is somewhat odd for a piece of empirical literature, the data discussed offers extremely interesting evidence. The three proposed explanations are as follows:

1. Structured-strain view: different positions inthe social structure explose individuals to different amounts of hardship and constraint. So... in a male dominated society, women may be more likely to experience feelings of helplesness and frustration as they experience different amounts of hardship and constraint than men.
2. Response-bias view: women express all emotions more freely than men. This makes women more aware than men of their emotions and more likely to talk about emotions to others, to be open and expressive. Women are also more likely than men to think that discussing personal well-being is acceptiable rather than stigmatizing. Thus when questioned about psychological well-being, women may be more likely to report depression and anxiety than men.
3. Gendered-response theory: women respond to the ubiquitous stress of life with somewhat different emotions than men. Women might feel anxious or depressed in response to the same stimuli that might cause men to feel agitated or angry. Measures focusing on depressive symptoms could, then be measuring women-specific states and not general distress response. Actually, Taylor et al. (2000) provides some interesting evidence for this particular theory (as well as the structured-strain theory) using a "bio-behavioral" framework. However, this paper was written at least 5 years earlier. Will come back to this one later.

So... this paper attempts to empirically prove that the argument "women do not actually experience more distress than men, they just look like they do because they are more expressive or because the questions we ask are more likely to elicit this type of response from women rather than men" is false and that women do, indeed, experience more distress than men in contemporary society.

In order to answer the question of whether some types of response tendencies account for the finding that women experience greater distress and depression than men rather than some real differences in biological and/or social factors, authors ask the following questions:

1. Does response tendency significantly increase reports of distress?
2. Do women more than men tend to report distress?
3. Does adjusting for the response tendency substantially decrease the estimated effect of sex on distress?

Findings:
Authors report that most available evidence indicates that sex differences in distress are not due to reporting tendencies. They find that indeed women are more expressive than men and that expressiveness can increase the reporting of symptoms. However, adjusting for experssiveness does diminish the estimated effect of sex on measures of negative mood, but it does not remove it. This effect remains highly significant although the effect size is simaller. So... there may be SOME support for the response-bias view, but it does not account for the full effect, only for a very small portion of it.

According to the gendered-response theory, women become depressed, while men become angry in response to the same stimulus. In fact, authors report that women become angry as wel as depressed. "Depression is a anger's companion: not its substitute." So, recognizing that one is angry and expressing it, rather than getting depressed, does not reduce the negative effects of the stimulus - women still tend to feel sad and experience more general malaise than men. Anger, in fact, could be one manifestation of distress, along with others. Also, women are not less angry than men. In fact, women may actually be more angry than men, reporting greater hostility and irritation. Of course, the final argument could be that if one were to compare men and women at the same level of distress, men would be more angry than women, however, results reported in the paper show the opposite. Women were more likely to yell and scream at another than men, when they were equally angry and distressed.

All in all, bad news for women: we suffer more distress than men.
Certainly there are other explanations. For example, another view contends that women and men suffer the same amount of frustration and hardship, but women respond to it worse than men. Another suggests that there is something to the competing hypotheses - what if men transform their aggression into behavior while women experience distress as feelings? Data presented in the paper can not account for either of these hypotheses. More answers in the reviews of the Vaananen et al. (2005) and Taylor et al. (2000) articles coming up.

Underestimating the Duration of Future Events: Memory Incorrectly Used or Memory Bias?

by Roy, Michael M.; Christenfeld, Nicholas J. S.; McKenzie, Craig R. M.
from Psychological Bulletin. 2005 Sep Vol 131(5) 738-756

People frequently underestimate how long it will take them to complete a task. The prevailing view is that during the prediction process, people incorrectly use their memories of how long similar tasks have taken in the past because they take an overly optimistic outlook. A variety of evidence is reviewed in this article that points to a different, although not mutually exclusive, explanation: People base predictions of future duration on their memories of how long past events have taken, but these memories are systematic underestimates of past duration. People appear to underestimate future event duration because they underestimate past event duration. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2005 APA, all rights reserved)

The mystery resolved - now I know why I never have enough time! I am too optimistic at how long it will take me to do things and I underestimate how long it has taken me to do the same or similar task in the past! Now if only I could easily correct this, life would be so much simpler to deal with.

No Credit Where Credit Is Due: Attributional Rationalization of Women's Success in Male-Female Teams

by Heilman, Madeline E.; Haynes, Michelle C.
from Journal of Applied Psychology. 2005 Sep Vol 90(5) 905-916

Abstract:
"In 3 experimental studies, the authors explored how ambiguity about the source of a successful joint performance outcome promotes attributional rationalization, negatively affecting evaluations of women. Participants read descriptions of a mixed-sex dyad's work and were asked to evaluate its male and female members. Results indicated that unless the ambiguity about individual contribution to the dyad's successful joint outcome was constrained by providing feedback about individual team member performance (Study 1) or by the way in which the task was said to have been structured (Study 2) or unless the negative expectations about women's performance were challenged by clear evidence of prior work competence (Study 3), female members were devalued as compared with their male counterparts-they were rated as being less competent, less influential, and less likely to have played a leadership role in work on the task. Implications of these results, both theoretical and practical, are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2005 APA, all rights reserved)"

This is article is very interesting. Although I have yet to read it very closely, but a cursory glance suggests there is good evidence that mixed gender groups, whose work is evaluated at a group level, are likely to devalue their female members' contributions and performance.

To be clearer about the method and its implications - the study used undergraduate students as evaluators of an investment team made up of a man and a woman. Participants were asked to evalute the performance of each individual in the group after reading a group performance evaluation report. They were also familiarized with the backgrounds of each group-member. Apparently, among college students, males and females did not differ in their evaluations. These evaluations went as follows:

"when participants were provided with individual performance information, there was no significant difference in competence ratings of male and female employees, but when participants were provided with group performance information, the female employee was rated as significantly less competent than the male employee. In addition, ..., women were rated as less competent when the performance information was for the group and not for the individual, whereas the type of performance information made no significant difference for men."

One caveat of these findings? The tasks evaluated were "sex-typed". That is, the tasks in the study were stereotypically associated with men (such as investment banking and portfolio development). This is even more important because women are still vastly under-represented in "male-type" careers.

The take away? Well, if you are a woman in a group, whose performance is being evaluated on the group level - be careful! "With group-level performance information, there is ambiguity regarding the degree of individual contribution to the final work product and thus there is ample opportunity to maintain stereotype-based expectations and to discount the contribution of the person expected not to perform well. ... When the task is considered to be male in character, it is only women, not men, for whom the ambiguity regarding individual contribution inherent in group-level performance information is potentially pernicious, fostering attributional rationalization."

Authors perform on two more studies, exploring potential mechanisms by which these effects may be counteracted. Their overall conclusions are as follows:
"the results of these studies indicate that working together with men in traditionally male domains can be detrimental for women—even when the work outcome is highly favorable. We found this to be the case unless (a) there was specific information about the female team member's individual performance excellence on the team task (Study 1), (b) the female team member's contribution to the successful joint outcome was irrefutable because of the structure of the task (Study 2), or (c) there was definitive information about the excellence of the team member's past performance effectiveness (Study 3). In the absence of these conditions, women were thought to be generally less competent, less influential in arriving at the successful team outcome, and less apt to have taken on a leadership role in the task than were their male counterparts."

This indicates (with stunning clarity for a psychology study), that it is important to individual performance evaluations for team work in organizations, especially for male-typed tasks in mixed-gender groups.

Social Geography -> Digital Geographies

Zook, M., Dodge, M., Aoyama, Y. & Townsend, A. (2004) New Digital Geographies: Information, Communication and Place. in S. Brunn, S. Cutter & J. Harrington (eds) Geography and Technology, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Netherlands.

Source: pdf of chapter

Abstract: This chapter provides an overview of contemporary trends relevant to the development of geographies based on new digital technologies such as the Internet and mobile phones. Visions of utopian and ubiquitous information superhighways and placeless commerce are clearly passé, yet priveleged individuals and places are ever more embedded in these new digital geographies while private and state entities are increasingly embedding these digital geographies in for us. First is a discussion of the centrality of geographical metaphors to the way in which we imagine and visualize the new digital geographies. Then the example of the commercial Internet (e-commerce) is used to demonstrate the continued central role of place in new digital geography both in terms of where activities cluster and how they vary over space. The transformation of digital connections from fixed (i.e., wired) to untethered (i.e., wireless) connections is explored as to its significance in the way we interact with information and the built environment. Finally is an examination of the troubling issue of the long data shadows cast by all individuals as they negotiate their own digital geographies vis-à-vis larger state and private entities.

Summary of main points: This chapter grapples with many issues simultaneiously never really giving an in-depth treatment to any of them. However, it is a good overview of the impact of digital technologies on urban spaces and their inhabitants. I deliberatly put the spaces first and inhabitants second because the paper attempts to approach these topics from a purely structural point of view, but drops to the level of individual when the former fails. Authors start out by pointing out the essential place-ness of the "placeless" digital technology - where bits are delivered "from here to there". Yet the rhetoric around digital technology conveniently conjures up the image of placelessness. Why?

Authors suggest that digital technologies are actually made understandable to consumers through the use of common analogies - "spaces" like "hyperspace, dataspace, netspace, cyberspace". Yet these analogies are not simply vehicles for understanding, but active constructs that create an illusion in an attempt to hide reality. That reality is the essential placeness of this technology. This is possible, because the infrastructure necessary to make digital technology function is largely invisible. Fiber-optic networks are largely invisible, and this invisibility may be one of the reasons why it has been so easy to concieve of the Internet as "nongeographic" - a nonspace somehow housed in aether. While this is generally true for the Internet, it is not so for cellular phones. Proliferation of cell towers is hardly invisible as local communities enter into drawn out arguments with wireless providers about the essential ugliness of mushrooming towers. Zook & colleagues argue that the "where and how of the physical embeddedness of data networks is important" for several reasons. Mainly because ignoring the physicality of the networks makes it difficult to understand the unevenness of access (illustrations of the digital divide) and easy to ignore potential vulnerability of these networks to malicious attacks. Zook et al. suggest cartographic visualizations as a potential remedy for this oversight.

There are different ways of mapping the Internet and a number of them have been attempted over the last decade. Zook et al. state that, since online interaction is currently dominated by "visual interfaces, rather than aural, tactile or olfactory interfaces", visualizations seem the most appropriate for attempting to understand the "latent spatial structures" of the Internet by examining information and interaction flow patterns. They state that it is important to consider the goal-directed activity as part of the information space. Authors then go on to suggest that "spatialization" may be the ultimate tool to create models "on the fly" from dynamic data, and that as mobility increases the role it plays in the use of digital technologies, this "on the fly" spatialization, combined with context-aware and location-based computing can create new individually tailored digital interactions in physical spaces. Ok... so we went from the complaint that certain kinds of mapping of the digital technology use and information flow were lacking or simply overlooked, to suggesting that there are methods that can create "on the fly" individualized renderings of information. They do mention that these kinds of development will bring with them implications for privacy and ethics that will need to be considered. At this point, the paper starts to sound a little prophetic - with the "this will happen" style of narrative. Quite honestly, I am a little lost - what is the point of these statements? There are many statements here, but little discussion of their value and meaning.

So far, the authors started out with saying that popular rhetoric attempts to "disembody" the Internet, but it is necessary to tie the network back to its physical manifestations, in order to really understand some of the important issues surrounding it (and to prevent a terrorist attack??). One way of doing that is through several different methods of geography visualzations. Spatialization, a method of visualizing large amounts of abstract data may work very well in this situation, and... once we start visualizing, we invitably will bring it back down to the individual user, and provide content to them based on their individual profile and location. It is unclear why the last part of statement follows from the previous ones.

Authors then go on to give an e-commerce example as a way to illustrate that physicality of the network really matters. They slam the dot com boom, then compare e-commerce development in Japan and Germany, noting how pre-existing cultural expecitations, social structures and policies affected the path of development in these two technologically advanced countries. Through these examples, authors arrive at a conclusion that "technology of the Internet does not itself determine the structure and role of these participating places but offers new possibilities for participation, interaction and exploitation based on existing historical and cultural attributes." So technology does not have a cookie-cutter effect on everyone (that's nice). However, its structure and limits interact with existing historical and cultural contexts of both places and people to produce unique outcomes.

This conclusion makes things tricky for something like The World Internet Project for example, where the goal is to measure general use of "the Internet" in the population and make general assessments on the basis of the numbers collected. Taking Zook et al. argument a little further - only total uniformity of access can make the numbers collected by this project in any way illustrative of general trends. Alternatively, these numbers need to be firmly tied to geographical differences between users in order to be interpretable. Thus the trends on which the project reports, may be relevant for specific populations but not for whole countries (at least in the case of large countries like the US, Canada or China). Also, if the project considers only PC-based Internet use, then the reports from China, Hong Kong or Japan, may be profoundly misleading, since much of "information and communication technology" use actually happens via a phone rather than a computer.

Having dealt with digital technologies in general and the "tethered" technologies specifically, authors go on to explore "untethered" wireless technologies. While their descriptions of "flocking" activity of youth are shallow and better analyses can be found in the work of Rich Ling and others, Zook et al. do consider the effect of mobile technologies on cities in general, which is something I haven't seen previously. They say that "traditionally, cities had functioned on a daily cycle of information flow with mass media like newspapers, third spaces like bars and cafes, and family conversations at the dinner table as the primary means of information exchange." Mobile technologies allow a completely different temporal pattern of information dissemination. This, in turn, could change the pattern of public consumption of information (often speeding it up) and subsequent reaction to this information - sometimes providing opportunities for unexpectedly timely responses. As adoption of wireless technologies increases, behavior patterns change from regulated and predictible to "on the fly" and dynamic, making them harder to control. I wonder whether these changes are really this simple and extreme though. Authors state that such untetherdness gives users more control over how where and when they create or consume information.

I am willing to accept this with a caveat that there remain issues of access (who has what kind of technology on hand), ability (who knows how to use whatever technology they have), and critical mass (who knows the people who also have said technology and know how to use it in order to take advantage of these new abilities). Regardless, however, the daily rhythm of the city hasn't changed dramatically - we still go to work in the morning, have lunch around midday, drink after work with friends, have dinner with family in the evening, maybe going out at night and sleep for 4-10 hours a day. These patterns may have slightly altered in the process of coordination, but they still exist. Regadless of our ability to receive information quicker, many of us still prefer to receive it when we choose to - on the way to work via radio or newspaper, during lunch from friends and colleagues, during our social hours. Just because information exists and is available, does not mean it is actually consumed, only that it can be consumed at a quicker pace.

Towards the end of this piece Zook and colleagues get to the final point under consideration - the panoptic properties of digital technologies. They come up with a brilliant concept of "data shadows" - the record of use of digital technology on a daily basis. All of us have grown parallel digital or "data shadows" that may be eternally persistent and used by others without our knowledge, while these shadows are connected directly to us. Authors acknowledge that the effect of these digital shadows is certainly not all bad and not all good. While purely Orwellian visions of the future may not be entirely justified, the purely utopian vision of smart technology creating blissful lives for us in the future is all too idealistic. As these "data shadows" become mobile, they undergo changes - making their owners constantly visible and accessible. An scene from the Minority Report comes to mind as the main character traverses a mall wading through voice advertisement tailored directly to him. This image of these perpetual, mobile, continuous "data shadows" with "long memories" is disconcerting when coupled with the realization that most users do not give thought to this development as they integrate digital technologies deeper and tighter into their lives. Although, this form of permanent memory can be beneficial to individual users, it can also give rise to an over-policed society.

What's to be done? There is no answer to that in this paper. Authors raise a large number of issues but give few answers aside from profetic-like statements of what will be without too many explanations of why. The pictures they paint are sometimes confusing and sometimes extremely compelling. Yet they conclude with a long description of what a future research agenda in social geography should be. Most of the questions they raise end up on this future research agenda, making me wonder, so what is it that we know now that we could use to hedge our bets and make the future potentially less Orwellian and, maybe, just little more idealistic.

Sociology->Migration->Social Networks

Magdol, Lynn (2000) The people you know: The impact of residential mobility on mothers' social network ties. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships V17(2) p.183-204

Source: Sage Pub
need subscription

Abstract: The objective of this study was to examine whether residential mobility disrupts work ties. Data from a two-wave community study of the stress and support in families with young children in Syracuse, New York were analyzed, focusing on mobility distance, mobility frequency, kin presence in the network, and change in networks over time. Mobility distance was a predictor of network distance: respondents who had moved longer distances had networks that were more dispersed, and local movers had networks that were more proximate. In general, beackground characteristics explained more variance in networks than did mobility factors. Longitudinal analyses revealed that long-distance movers experienced an increase in network distance over the 3 years between waves and that the short-term effect of local moves on network proximity became non-significant. Mobility frequency had no significant effects on networks, net of controls, in either cross-sectional or longitudinal analyses. The longitudinal analyses suggest the importance of studying change in networks. The distance effects suggest that residential mobility cannot automatically be used as an indicator of social deficits.

Summary of main points: The study asked five main questions:

1. Do movers have fewer social ties?
2. Do movers have social ties that are geographically dispersed?
3. Do movers have social ties that are more kin-dominated?
4. How do the social ties of movers change over time?

The data came from an NIH-funded project called Family Matters, conducted by Cornell U. in 1978-79 with a followup in 1981 (note this was done before the proliferation of the Internet). This is a secondary analysis of this data. Analysis focused on young mothers with children.

Answers:
1. Mobility was related to network distance but not network size, suggesting that people who moved had more dispersed networks but these networks were similar size to stayers' networks - i.e. moving did not prompt people to have larger networks.
2. Overall there was no long-term change in networks over time following an earlier period of adjustment.

Overall, the study suggests that geographic proximity is not a requirement for having vital social ties. However, the study also showed that over time networks of movers became more distant due to the moves of their network members, suggesting that people who move tend to have relationships with other people who are likely to move. This, in turn, suggests a strong relationship between individual characteristics and propensity to move.

Another important insight of this study is that movers who primarily made local moves had networks that were much closer than those that made long distance moves. This suggests that residential mobility does have an impact on residential mobility allowing long distance movers to create more distributed networks than stayers or local movers. This is contrary to conclusions made by Wellman (1979) from the study of East Yorkers.

Related work: Magdol (2002) Is moving gendered? The effects of residential mobility on the psychological well-being of men and women. Sex Roles, V.47(11/12).
also see work by Wellman on social network distance

CHI reactions or how I used Dewey to review papers

It's an odd kind of meeting when person you meet for the first time (or so you think) suddenly tells you - hi, i know you, you wrote my rejection letter... Quite honestly, I did not know where to hide just at that moment. This also made me rethink the process by which my workshop co-organizers and I reviewed papers for our Engaging the City workship at CHI 2005.

Writing is probably one of the hardest things I do for this whole academic shtick. Of course, I've gotten my share of rejection letters (not so pleasant, but it's a learning experience). Yet when I was faced with the prospect of reviewing papers for a workshop that I was helping organize, the reality of evaluating the writing of others became a thorny personal issue. Just how DO you evaluate someone else's writing? What do you apply as markers of quality? How do you know?

Thinking about it, I realized that reviewing is inseparable form my own practice or writing. Actually, probably one of the most helpful things I've ever read for my own writing was John Dewey's "Logic: The Theory of Inquiry". Turns out, not only was this piece extremely helpful in informing my own writing, but it was also a roadmap I'd tried to follow when reviewing. There are four important rules that I got from that piece, rules that I tried to apply to every paper I wrote and reviewed since (it really hasn't been that long since I'd discovered this, but the changes in my approach were immediately evident). Here is the main gist of it:

Inquiry (any research project must be a form of inquiry for it to be a worthwhile and interesting undertaking) is a mode of conduct and has a beginning, middle and end. It involves a very specific pattern. Dewey himself defines inquiry as follows: "Inquiry is the controlled or directed transormation of an indeterminate situation into one that is so determinate in its consitutent distinctions and relations as to convert the elements of the original situation into a unified whole."

So... the process of research or design must have four parts to it:
1. the indeterminate situation (a situation that is not fully understood, unknown or uncertain - for example "making friends is a difficult proccess and we actually don't quite know how people do it")
2. the formation of a problem for inquiry - that is, figuring out exactly what is the major question your research or design must answer. For example - considering the above "indeterminate situation" of making friends, the question could be - what are the major determinants of whether someone is considered a friend or not?
3. the distinctions and relations that may be discovered in a directed transofmration of the situation - this means, you must understand what is already known about the topic of your interest and the question you are asking and then perform investigations to add to that knowledge in a systematic fashion so that you may answer the original question you posed
4. the unified outcome that is produced - that is, once the answer to the quesiton you posed is found, you must incorporate that with existing information and add it to the larger framework of the situation itself (in this case "how do people make friends") in an effort to move towards a complete understanding of the situation (making the situation determinant).

So, any research paper must start out with the description of an indeterminate situation (along with an argument of exactly why it is indeterminate). It then must ask the "question", that is "formulate a problem of inquiry", setting a clear thesis for the work. Then it must balance both the existing theoretical framework it uses to investigate/find answers and the advances that are made to add to the existing knowledge in an effort to answer the question. It must finish with showing how the new knowledge is incorporated into the coherent whole of the original situation and contributes towards making the situation determinant.

During writing - this is a strict road map and the hardest portion, I find, is clearly formulating the question.

During reviewing - if a paper is missing any of these pieces, especially if after reading it I continually ask myself "so what IS the QUESTION?", then it is clear that the paper will not be accepted. Every author must have a clear purpose for both doing research and writing reports on it. Fumbling in the dark and striking out at random, without a clear goal and/or an understanding of existing knowledge surrounding each question is not exactly a good way of getting at answers.

In this piece, Dewey also distinguishes between common sense and science. I tried to describe this particular relationship in my earlier review of the piece itself. After attending CHI, I simply could not get rid of a nagging feelig: a very large proportion of "research" reported at CHI did not feel to me like scientific inquiry. On the contrary, it seemed to fit better with what Dewey called "common sense" inquiry. Although this is not necessarily a bad thing, in some way, this helps me understand the "what" and "why" of CHI...