Free from Numbers? The Politics of Qualitative Sociology in the U.S. Since 1945

In a world that is said to be more and more filled with quantities, this paper focuses on the practices and reasons of people refusing quantities; people who want to purify their world from numbers. It uses the history of qualitative sociology as an example and shows how actors refused the quantitative for political or ethical reasons. But they opposed only a certain set of qualitative methods—especially the statistical survey—, which they associated with certain political “demons” (the State, the Army, Bureaucracy), but not the quantitative in general. On the contrary, even qualitative sociologists who opposed surveys did make room for other ways of using numbers, which are very different, often very original and surprising (including social studies of data, data gleanings, conceptual canvasing).

The childbirth rituals of the Yakuts: traditions and modernity

The purpose of this paper is to consider the transformation of the maternity rites among the Yakuts from the end of the 19th to the beginning of the 21st centuries. The area under research is the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), Eastern Siberia. The main source base was represented by the authors' field materials collected in 2016-2018 in the Verkhnevilyuysky, Churapchinsky, Ust-Aldansky, and Megino-Kangalassky districts. The field studies were conducted using modern and traditional methods of qualitative sociology. The key methods of collecting field ma-terials included modern historical-anthropological methods of inclusive observation, and expert and in-depth inter-viewing of local residents. The stages of the ritual behavior practiced in preparation for conception, pregnancy, dur-ing childbirth, and during the postpartum period, as well as aimed at survival of the newborn, have been identified and clarified. The study of the transformation of the maternity rites shows that in the modern culture of the Yakuts there are only few prohibitions related to the life of the child in the first days after birth, whereas other rituals have faded away due to the development of medicine and the loss of fear, among both women and society as a whole, of infertility or death of the woman in labor or the baby in the process of birth itself.

The afterlife of interviews: explicit ethics and subtle ethics in sensitive or distressing qualitative research

When conducting interviews about sensitive subject matter such as family life, powerful emotions may arise. The kinds of unexpected distress that can surface in interviews concerning topics laden with personal significance are different to the readily anticipated trauma that accompanies interviews in post-crisis or post-conflict situation. This article analyses the ethical considerations that accompany such research, drawing upon literature from oral history and qualitative sociology. The article traces ethical issues during the temporal phases of qualitative research – before, during and after an interview – before proposing three strategies that interviewers can adopt to help protect narrators from ongoing harm or distress after an interview. Such ethical safeguards include the self-interview, the post-interview follow-up with the narrator, and adopting an ethics of reciprocity that allows the narrator to feel that they are contributing to a larger purpose through involvement in research.

Social Dynamics Of Generation Exchange In Society

In this article the author described the style of the analysis of the generation history which has been studied in sociology. This style is considered qualitative sociology style, and its main importance was based with the possibility of how generation changing influenced to the process which happened in society.

Fatherhood escape as a significant feature of the gender contract of Russian men

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to characterize such a feature of the gender contract of Russian men as fatherhood escape, as well as to determine the social consequences that it has for family relationship.Design/methodology/approachThe study was carried out in the design of qualitative sociology. The methodology is based on the theoretical construct of a gender contract, adapted to modern Russian society and the concept of social practices. The empirical base consists of six expert interviews with specialists in family psychology and conflictology.FindingsThe fatherhood escape in modern Russia is characterized by the depreciation of emotional labor; marking communications with children and caring for them as exclusively female activities; presentation of their employment in the public sphere as a legitimate reason for avoiding family problems; the active use by men of the technique of ignoring replicas of the interlocutor as a technique in communication with family members. This worsens the quality of intra-family communication, leads to the separation of family members from each other, especially children and leads to an increase in their deviant behavior.Research limitations/implicationsThe design of a qualitative study makes it impossible to assess the level of prevalence and severity of the phenomenon, this study is a pilot. Its purpose is to record the very fact of the existence of fatherhood escape in everyday family (social) practices. Subsequent studies should be able to show the relationship between fatherhood escape and domestic violence, as well as the role of this trait of the male gender contract in the reproduction of toxic masculinity.Originality/valueThe phenomenon of fatherhood escape and its social consequences in modern Russia is under-studied. This study contributes to the description of this phenomenon on Russian materials and also reveals some of the social consequences of this feature of the male gender contract, in particular its effect on intra-family communication, increasing the risk of deviant behavior of children and complicating the fulfillment by women of the “working mother” gender contract.

Buryat Migrations and Diasporas in Historical Space and Time (20th-21st Centuries)

The article focuses on diasporas and migration in the Mongolian world (both inside and outside its borders). There is a wealth of ethno-diasporal forms and mechanisms, unexpected and peculiar adaptation processes of migrants and host societies on this research field. The novelty lies in the attempt to compare the Buryat migrations to Mongolia, China and South Korea. The rich “line” of migration types from traditional migrations to modern educational and labour migration in a globalizing world makes the problem extremely urgent. The goal is the analysis of diasporal strategies (from the transplantation version of Shenekhen Buryats to modern cross-border Buryat migrants consolidating via the Internet) and a preliminary assessment of the characteristics of crossborder Buryat migration to South Korea. The study of ethnomigration processes makes it possible to consider the practices of adaptation of migrants to the host society, strategies for constructing migrant communities, the institutionalization processes of the Buryat diasporas associated with the creation of interaction mechanisms in host countries. The study takes into account the latest achievements of various sciences, at the junction of which it was carried out. Along with general historical approaches, methods of qualitative sociology were used: interviews, polls, discursive analysis of the media, and research on a set of official documents, statistics. The article consists of three case-studies and is based on an analysis of Russian, Mongolian, Korean official documents, media materials, a series of conversations and interviews obtained during field studies of the authors in Mongolia, China and South Korea

INTER-Encyclopedia: Interaction. Interview. Interpretation

The work is an attempt to generalize the scientific interpretation of fundamental concepts in the framework of a qualitative paradigm, such as interaction, interview and interpretation. These terms are usually used in a broader sociological theoretical and methodological literature, and have their own history within the social sciences. Though, in modern science, these categories are already embedded in the terminology and semantics of the interpretive paradigm, and they have acquired additional meanings and context of use in the thesaurus of the qualitative sociologist. Therefore, the goal is to describe them in more details, in the genre of dictionary entries, as terms embedded and interpreted in the field of qualitative sociology; as concepts used during the construction of the methodological design of qualitative research, and in the practice of fieldwork or analysis of primary data. Moreover, these three terms define the general concept and configuration of our journal “Interaction. Interview. Interpretation”.

Public service as a social lift to regional elites: qualitative sociology dimension

The article is devoted to the analysis of subjective assessments of regional elite representatives(public servants) regarding their own social role, place and significance in society, and their assessmentof the public service performance efficiency as a social lift. It was used a qualitative methodology toanalyze opinion of regional elite representatives concerning the civil service efficiency as a social lift.Such methodology is focused on meanings and senses, their creation and design features in the process ofsocial communication, which allows to bypass formalized and socially approved responses of informantsand to discover the actual state of affairs in the population. Research data were obtained during in-depth,focused interviews with public service representatives of various ranks and departments of Zaporizhzhiaoblast in April-May 2017.According to the results of the research, it was determined that public servants, as subjects/actors ofstate decision making processes, can influence on society within the framework of regional competences,which gives them certain privileges and signs of elitism at the regional level. At the same time, it wasdetermined that the public service institute operates as a social elevator for regional elites with certainlimitations – to a certain level – since the movement process is provided not only by the personal qualitiesof individuals, but also by their political preferences, the breadth of social ties, membership in certaininfluential groups. This feature leads to the fact that the personal advancements of public servants turninto jump-free mode and do not depend on their abilities, professionalism and potential. Therefore, entryinto the regional elite is not a resulted through an «idle» social lift, but through the usage of additionalchannels of social mobility.