IIFT 2021 Slot 1 Question Paper (23rd Dec)

Read the passage and answer the questions.
Passage I

Qualitative research methods are often mischaracterized by advocates, users, and critics alike because toooften the reflexive, iterative, and flexible methods are misunderstood as 'just making do.' There is a goodpragmatic tradition of "making do," from Dewey to the present, that describes the necessities as well asvirtues of using what situations provide in their immediacy as the grounds of social action. While qualitativeresearch certainly shares some of this pragmatic bricolage, good research, qualitative as well asquantitative, is designed as well as improvised. One of the merits of qualitative research is its particularopenness to serendipitous invention; one of its failures, however, has been an unwillingness, or inability, onthe part of its practitioners, until recently, to specify how that openness to 'what situations make available'can be both systematic and creative.

Over the years I have probably reviewed hundreds of research proposals; too large a number of theseclaimed that because the researcher was doing a qualitative study, the kinds of data and forms of collectioncould not be specified in advance. I was always a bit embarrassed by this, feeling let down by my side. Itsometimes seemed as if our teaching of qualitative research was creating a mystical religion, a set of ourown unexamined fetishes just at the moment we set about to identify others' taken for grantedassumptions and social meanings. In this vein, some years ago I heard a colleague advise a student goingout to do field work for the first time "to be like a blank slate," "just tell me everything you see and hear,write it all down." The student was completely baffled and clearly at a loss about what to do, to do first, orsecond, or how to begin. What would constitute telling me all you see and hear. Importantly, the studenthad read a lot of sociology, and knew a lot about signs and signifiers, latent as well as manifest patterns insocial relations. She knew that competent social actors are not blank slates. She felt incompetent but notentirely blank. She had a project, after all.

It seemed from the proposals I read and the conversations I observed that we, qualitative sociologists,believed that we could not specify what we were going to do (i.e. lay out a design and plan of theresearch), because that would mean that we would have -- by that naming -- necessarily circumscribedwhat we would do. Having supposedly controlled a priori what we would do, we would be unable to dosomething else along the way, as the situations and insights invited. We would have lost the distinctivevirtues of qualitative research. Somehow, in this mysticism about qualitative methods, research designsseemed to be understood as enforceable contracts or sets of machine instructions; any deviation from thedesign was understood to be either impossible, a failure, or a mistake. Qualitative research was celebratedfor its flexibility, the temporal coincidence of collection and analysis and thus prior design was, bydefinition, a threat to qualitative research.

Of course, I have overstated the issue but we were asked to provide fodder for discussion. And, to someextent, this overstatement puts the issue in a bold form. Why should qualitative research be any less welldesigned (or specified) than quantitative research? When I think about the steps in different methods, itoccurs to me that most of what gets put into a research design, let us say for a survey project orquantitative research, could also be put in the design for an ethnography or a project of in-depth-interviewing and narrative analysis. The major differences lie in the fact that qualitative projects (1) will notrely on statistical analyses and therefore do not need to produce probability samples and standardizedcollection instruments at the same temporal pace and placement in the research process. As a consequenceof temporal pace and sequencing, qualitative projects (2) will be able to adjust the forms of data, modesand cites of collection in response to the ongoing processes of analysis and interpretation. This is certainlyso. I suspect, however, that the resistance to detailed research qualitative research designs derives less,however, from emphasis on these key differences than from an overly idealized or reified view of how otherforms of research proceed, whether quantitative sociology or chemistry or biology. That is, all researchdevelops (is in the making and rethinking) throughout the stages of design, collection, and analysis. Almostall research produces much that was unanticipated and therefore had to be responded to with adjustmentsalong the way. The central difference lies in the explicit weight of recognition of and preparation for thisprocess of adjustment in most qualitative projects. Nothing precludes a preliminary design that sets theresearcher on a path that is understood as a first approximation of the work process.

I should say before going much further that there are varieties of qualitative research and my remarks willnot appropriately characterize all. For the moment, I am referring primarily to ethnographic fieldwork (i.e.research study looking at the social interaction of users in a given environment), participant observation,in-depth open ended interviewing, and other work involving interpretative qualitative analysis of documentsof various sorts. Thus, the mode of analysis rather than the type of data more appropriately describes workas qualitative. (The content of documents and interviews can be analysed quantitatively or qualitatively.Observations can be systematically structured and quantified but much observation is not, nor would beproductive.)

The goal of research is to produce results that can be falsifiable and in some way affirmable by rationalprocesses of actors other than the author. Most important is that the researcher provide an account of how the conclusions were reached, why the reader should believe the claims and how one might go about tryingto produce a similar account. What makes science morally, and rationally, compelling is that it is a publicenterprise. I am not referring to the funding or organizational supports. Rather, science is distinguished bythe claim to produce shared understanding/knowledge through modes that can be rationally andcollectively apprehended. In short, we have an obligation not to "hide the ball." To the extent that we do"hide the ball," we transform our science into rhetorical performance.

Read the passage and answer the questions.
Passage II

Sociologist Matthews writes that Let's say someone writes an academic paper quoting fifty people who haveworked on the subject and provided background materials for his study; assume, for the sake of simplicity,that all fifty are of equal merit. Another researcher working on the exact same subject will randomly citethree of those fifty in his bibliography. Merton showed that many academics cite references without havingread the original work; rather, they'll read a paper and draw their own citations from among its sources. So a third researcher reading the second article selects three of the previously referenced authors for his citations. These three authors will receive cumulatively more and more attention as their names becomeassociated more tightly with the subject at hand. The difference between the winning three and the othermembers of the original cohort is mostly luck: they were initially chosen not for their greater skill, butsimply for the way their names appeared in the prior bibliography. Thanks to their reputations, thesesuccessful academics will go on writing papers and their work will be easily accepted for publication. It iseasier for the rich to get richer, for the famous to become more famous. This theory can easily apply tocompanies, businessmen, actors, writers, and anyone else who benefits from past success.

During the 1940s, a Harvard linguist, George Zipf, examined the properties of language and came up withan empirical regularity now known as Zipf's law, which, of course, is not a law (and if it were, it would notbe Zipf's). It is just another way to think about the process of inequality. The mechanisms he describedwere as follows: the more you use a word, the less effortful you will find it to use that word again, so youborrow words from your private dictionary in proportion to their past use. This explains why out of the sixtythousand main words in English, only a few hundred constitute the bulk of what is used in writings, andeven fewer appear regularly in conversation. Likewise, the more people aggregate in a particular city, themore likely a stranger will be to pick that city as his destination. The big get bigger and the small staysmall, or get relatively smaller. A great illustration of preferential attachment can be seen in themushrooming use of English as a lingua franca—though not for its intrinsic qualities, but because peopleneed to use one single language, or stick to one as much as possible, when they are having a conversation.So whatever language appears to have the upper hand will suddenly draw people in droves; its usage willspread like an epidemic, and other languages will be rapidly dislodged. I am often amazed to listen toconversations between people from two neighboring countries, say, between a Turk and an Iranian, or aLebanese and a Cypriot, communicating in bad English, moving their hands for emphasis, searching forthese words that come out of their throats at the cost of great physical effort. Even members of the SwissArmy use English (not French) as a lingua franca (it would be fun to listen). Consider that a very smallminority of Americans of northern European descent is from England; traditionally the preponderant ethnicgroups are of German, Irish, Dutch, French, and other northern European extraction. Yet because all thesegroups now use English as their main tongue, they have to study the roots of their adoptive tongue anddevelop a cultural association with parts of a particular wet island, along with its history, its traditions, andits customs!

Read the passage and answer the questions.
Passage

How is it that people come to use certain nonverbal behaviours in specific settings, or associate a particularbehaviour (e.g., smiling) with a particular meaning (e.g., happiness)? A sociocultural approach toanswering these questions focuses on the ways in which behaviours and their meanings are prescribed atsocial or cultural levels and on the ways in which people come to acquire them. Encompassing a number ofmodels and theories, the sociocultural paradigm emphasizes the influence of human interaction in creatingand transmitting understanding; thus, it highlights the effects of culture, class, religion, sexuality, power, orother socially maintained factors on the enactment and meaning of behaviour.

The fundamental assumption underlying the sociocultural paradigm is that interpersonal behaviour and itsmeanings are learned through the diffusion of social or cultural knowledge and are, therefore, malleable.Because interpersonal behaviours are learned rather than innate, both behaviours and their meanings canbe altered by changing the knowledge that is conveyed. This can explain, for instance, not only whycultures vary one from another in both their behaviours and the meanings of those behaviours, but alsowhy, without access to another culture’s knowledge, people often find cross-cultural communication sochallenging.

Central to the sociocultural paradigm, then, are two ideas: i) Most nonverbal communication is learned,rather than innate, and, ii) Most non-verbal behaviours do not have inherent meanings, but rather, theirmeanings are products of social consensus. These principles have found widespread acceptance within thefield of human communication, perhaps, in part, because of their considerable intuitive appeal. It is easy toidentify examples of behavioural learning simply by considering the apparent influence of parents,teachers, gender roles, cultural norms, and the media on children’s behaviours. Consequently, theparadigm seems to have face validity as an approach that is isomorphic with people’s everydayexperiences.

A related strength of the sociocultural paradigm is found in the magnitude of the empirical evidence thathas been marshalled in support of it. Perhaps as a result of its intuitive appeal, many researchers haveapplied the tenets of the paradigm to their own work and have found support for the influence of learning,or for the social embeddedness of meaning, across a wide range of topics, ranging from personalitydevelopment and child discipline, to gender role acquisition, doctor-patient communication, and therelational messages of nonverbal behaviours.

One potential criticism of the sociocultural paradigm is that its emphasis on the social influences onlearning behaviour and creating meaning obscures what may be substantial non-social influences on thesame outcomes, including the influence of genetics. Certainly, any paradigm will lead its proponents toattend to particular variables more than others; the problem lies in the potential to misinterpret geneticeffects, for instance, as the effects of learning or socialization. An important example derives from thestudy of parental influence on child personality development. As Harris (1998) noted in her detailed review,there is no shortage of social science research showing that children are more likely than not to grow upwith personalities similar to those of their parents. That is, pleasant, affectionate parents tend to rearpleasant, affectionate children, whereas aggressive, violent parents tend to rear children who are likewiseaggressive and violent. Working from the framework of the sociocultural paradigm, one would find littledifficulty explaining these robust patterns as products of socialization: children observe their parentsbehaving in a pleasant, affectionate manner and come to adopt the same disposition themselves. However,as Harris (1995) pointed out, much of the research examining parental-offspring congruence in dispositionhas failed to control for an important alternative hypothesis: children are similar to their parents because oftheir genetic relatedness to the parents, not because of how they were socialized. To the extent thatresearchers in this area have failed to entertain (and, consequently, to control for) such an alternative, therefore, they may run the risk of misattributing—or at least, overattributing—the observed similaritybetween parents and children to a social influence, when a non-social influence is also operative.