Back to basics: how do we know what we know?
Within STS, data is often obtained from close observation of practices and from interviews with actors engaged in the practices in which we are interested. Sometimes we have only interview data, perhaps from different types of social actors; sometimes we rely solely on our own observations and sometimes we have both observations and interviews. Rarely do we reflect on what these different types of data enable us to do and say as researchers.
In this paper we will draw on a recent study in which we interviewed patients and health care professionals and also observed patient-practitioner consultations. The study was about how women and men informed themselves about, respectively, menopause and erectile dysfunction, and the treatments for them. We were primarily interested in questions about the emergence of the ‘informed patient’ role, the ways in which patients understood risk and constructed risk narratives and the ways in which the internet may or may not be incorporated into an already dense health information landscape. The purpose of this presentation is to explore the methodological issues raised by ‘triangulation’, in this case both different sources of data (patients, professionals, consultations) and different means of data collection (interviews and observations). We will draw upon our own experiences of using this data to reflect on an old but recently neglected question within STS, namely what is the status of observation in research based within a constructivist research paradigm?
Sally Wyatt, Virtual Knowledge Studio
sally.wyatt@vks.knaw.nl
www.virtualknowledgestudio.nl