Abstract
Theories of culture and action, especially after the cognitive turn, have developed more complex understandings of how unconscious, embodied, internalized culture motivates action. As our theories have become more sophisticated, our methods for capturing these internal processes have not kept up and we struggle to adjudicate among theories of how culture shapes action. This article discusses what I call “productive” methods: methods that observe people creating a cultural object. Productive methods, I argue, are well suited for drawing out moments of shared automatic cognition and resonance. To demonstrate the value of productive methods, I describe my method of asking focus group participants to devise and draw AIDS campaign posters collectively. I then 1) show how this productive method made visible distinct moments of both automatic and deliberative cognition, 2) offer an operational definition of resonance and demonstrate how the process of drawing revealed moments of resonance, and 3) suggest how this method allowed me to investigate the relationship between cognition and resonance and their effect on action. To conclude, I discuss strategies for using productive methods and advocate for their use in measuring culture.
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Notes
This divide has been variously labeled: Cognitive v. material, subject v. object, internalization v. externalization (Berger and Luckmann 1966), implicit v. explicit culture (Wuthnow and Witten 1988). In addition, here I echo DiMaggio’s (1997) point that not all schemas are cultural to the same degree. We fundamentally care about schemas that are shared rather than individualistic.
As Wuthnow has argued, “The product of our interviews will not be meanings, but discourse about meanings” (1987, p. 63).
Central to this idea is the notion that people are acting rather than responding. The methodological language we use is suggestive of the problem—we engage “respondents” who respond to the external cues or constraints we give them, not “actors” who act of their own volition. Ethnographic methods capture action better than most, but to make sense of how culture is working researchers often rely on their own interpretations of how people’s subjective experiences motivate their behavior or ask people to respond, reflect, and justify their actions after the fact.
While they are not the subject of this article, it should be noted that the posters drawn by my respondents did not resemble the posters and billboards that were most available in the public sphere. As I discuss below, they often depicted images of death (e.g., skeletons, skull and crossbones, and coffins) whereas health posters depict life. The exception being that my focus groups with HIV-positive Ghanaians avoided images of death, preferring instead to depict paradoxes: HIV-positive people can be fat, symptom free. While the images may diverge from available AIDS campaigns, the slogans they chose for their drawing often borrowed from common phrases from billboards and posters.
Reviewers pressed me to consider whether seeing consistency across the “drawn” poster and the “selected” poster was an echo effect, that similarities are a product of “selecting” posters that confirm their original choices in the “drawn” poster. I cannot rule out this possibility, but I can say this: while the posters had a great deal of similarity in imagery, the slogans varied a great deal. If it were truly an echo effect then I would see a similar echo in the messages they chose, which I did not.
One drawback with productive methods is that they are expensive for projects that seek to capture systematically the breadth of a population. Fixed-category questions would be better for measuring patterns in automatic cognition across larger groups. Putting productive methods in tandem with fixed-category surveys might cancel out the drawbacks of each method. For instance, you could use the drawing technique early in the research process to identify the valid categories for a fixed-category survey of a broader population later.
Vaisey (2009) assumes that the people deciding between fixed-categories exert minimal cognitive energy in making their choice. One criticism of this approach is that outcome data do not offer a true measure of whether respondents answered via automatic or deliberative cognition. Based on prior research, Vaisey assumes respondents answer surveys with as little cognitive effort as possible and rely heavily on automatic cognition/practical consciousness. This may vary by survey question or by respondent. Without a measuring time to response, making surveys time dependent like Implicit Association Test procedures (Srivastava and Banaji 2011), or directly observing and accounting for the speed of decision making as people take a survey, one cannot make confident claims that fixed response surveys get at automatic cognition. Such assumptions need empirical verification.
This focus on a task parallels Ghaziani’s (2009) work on “resinousness” where meanings stick better when attached to a concrete organizational task. I would argue that the resinousness of meanings when attached to a task makes those meanings more visible.
Ferree (2003) also defines resonance as “mutually affirming interaction of a frame with a discursive opportunity structure supportive of the terms of its argument.” This is set in opposition to a definition of radicalism, which is “mutually contradictory” rather than affirming. This is distinct from other definitions in that it is interested in resonance as the connection of an idea and a discursive structure, rather than something that happens between ideas and audiences.
Recent work in psychology on “aha” moments, “eureka effect,” and “insight” resembles my arguments about resonace. Topolinski and Reber’s (2010) article on the phenomenology of insight argue that the feelings of positive affect at moments of insight come about when people shift from slow cognitive work to sudden, easy understanding, linked to the concept of “processing fluency.” Where I see resonance differently is the strong connection to positive affect. Psychology seems to want to strip insight from meaning, arguing that insight is just the feeling of moving from slow to fast when a solution presents itself, but that the content of the solution does not matter. I would argue that the meaning matters tremendously. Making sense of seeing a gaunt body of a friend dying, and the resonance one feels when on interpreting the friend’s condition as being a result of AIDS, would heighten emotions, but that affect may not be positive. One could feel fear, horror, shock, but not ebullience.
See also Pugh (2013) for a discussion of capturing emotions through interviews. I also should note here that my measurement of resonance is essentially dichotomous, indicated by the presence or absence of heightened emotion. Future work might consider ways to measure varieties or intensities of resonance.
Although it would need additional empirical verification, my sense is that moments of resonance evoke a variety of emotions (e.g., elation, sadness, or anger) but invariably evoke heightened expressions of those emotions.
Of course, these are imperfect measures as focus groups happen in contexts abstracted out from the real world. But, we have to assume some degree of alignment between what seems resonant in the group and what resonates for people as they use culture to make meaning and act in the world.
This research, conducted by the Ghana Sustainable Change Project, was presented at the national anti-stigma campaign stakeholders meeting September 11, 2006.
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Acknowledgments
This article was presented at the “Measuring Culture” Conference at the University of British Columbia in October 2012. Thanks to John Mohr and Amin Ghaziani for making it possible and encouraging me to write this article. I am grateful to Amin Ghaziani (again) and Iddo Tavory for their incisive criticisms during the review process—their comments made for a much better article. Thanks to Christopher Bail, Kari Christoffersen, Erin McDonnell, Ashley Mears, and Kelcie Miller for comments and suggestions on earlier drafts. Omar Lizardo also deserves thanks for being a great sounding board. This research was generously funded by a National Science Foundation dissertation grant, the Martin P. Levine Fellowship from the American Sociological Association, and fellowships from Northwestern University.
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McDonnell, T.E. Drawing out culture: productive methods to measure cognition and resonance. Theor Soc 43, 247–274 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-014-9224-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-014-9224-5