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27 Apr
What brings me to today’s post is the new piece on hunger in Foreign Policy by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. On one hand, this is great news – good to see development rising to the fore in an outlet like Foreign Policy. I also largely agree with their conclusions – that the poverty trap/governance debate in development is Cheap Ambien To Buy Online oversimplified, that food security outcomes are not explicable through a single theory, etc. On the Cheap Ambien To Buy Online other hand, from the perspective of a qualitative researcher looking at development, there is Cheap Ambien To Buy Online nothing new in this article. Indeed, the Cheap Ambien To Buy Online implicit premise of the article is galling: When they argue that Cheap Ambien To Buy Online to address poverty, “In practical terms, that meant we’d have to start understanding how the poor really live their lives,” the implication is that nobody has been doing this. But what Cheap Ambien To Buy Online of the tens of thousands of anthropologists, geographers and sociologists (as well as representatives of other cool, hybridized fields like new cultural historians and ethnoarchaeologists). Hell, what of the Peace Corps?
Whether intentional or Cheap Ambien To Buy Online not, this article wipes the qualitative research slate clean, allowing the Cheap Ambien To Buy Online authors to present their work in a methodological and intellectual vacuum. This is the first of my problems with this article – not so much with its findings, but with its appearance of method. While I am Cheap Ambien To Buy Online sure that there is more to their research than presented in the Cheap Ambien To Buy Online article, the way their piece is structured, the case studies look like evidence/data for a new framing of food security. They are not – they are illustrations of the larger conceptual points that Banerjee and Duflo are making. I am sure that Banerjee and Duflo know this, but the reader does not – instead, most readers will think this Cheap Ambien To Buy Online represents some sort of qualitative research, or a mixed method approach that Cheap Ambien To Buy Online takes “hard numbers” and mixes it in with the loose suppositions that Banerjee and Duflo offer by way of explanation for the “surprising” outcomes they present. But loose supposition is not qualitative research – at best, it Cheap Ambien To Buy Online is journalism. Bad journalism. My work, and the work of many, many colleagues, is Cheap Ambien To Buy Online based on rigorous methods of observation and analysis that produce validatable data on social phenomena. The work that led to Delivering Development and many of my refereed publications took nearly two years of on-the-ground observation and Cheap Ambien To Buy Online interviewing, including follow-ups, focus groups and even the use of archaeology and Cheap Ambien To Buy Online remotely-sensed data on land use to cross-check and validate both my data and Cheap Ambien To Buy Online my analyses.
You really should read the whole thing.
As one who Cheap Ambien To Buy Online has a Masters degree in Development Studies but who chose to Cheap Ambien To Buy Online do a PhD in anthropology because I found that development research is Cheap Ambien To Buy Online all too often dealing with quantitave, “generalisable” data, and Cheap Ambien To Buy Online who has concluded said PhD, I find it really interesting that Cheap Ambien To Buy Online the RCT movement in economics seem to be taking credit, in the Cheap Ambien To Buy Online media and in policy circles, for what ethnographers – anthropologists, rural sociologists, historians, human geographers – have Cheap Ambien To Buy Online been saying all along. This is that things are a lot more complicated than Cheap Ambien To Buy Online people want to think, that it is extremely difficult to find a Cheap Ambien To Buy Online generalisable explanation, and that at the end of the day, what Cheap Ambien To Buy Online leads one to better understanding of issues is attention to personal stories, and Cheap Ambien To Buy Online an attempt to tease out how those stories are linked to Cheap Ambien To Buy Online larger structures, like local politics, regional politics, the economic structures, colonisation, culture etc. etc. One cannot arrive at this Cheap Ambien To Buy Online sort of understanding without spending time trying to understand the interaction between all these elements. Now that Cheap Ambien To Buy Online economists have discovered qualitative research it seems as if it were never there, as if there aren’t people who Cheap Ambien To Buy Online have been pointing to the importance of understanding nuances and Cheap Ambien To Buy Online personal stories.
I have Cheap Ambien To Buy Online deliberately refrained from commenting on RCT in economics because I wanted to Cheap Ambien To Buy Online read some of the texts, but since Edward Carr took thoughts out of my head I thought I would quote him and Cheap Ambien To Buy Online call attention to the fact that these kinds of studies have Cheap Ambien To Buy Online been going on for a long while. If economists are not aware of that Cheap Ambien To Buy Online (I think some of them are) it is their fault for not looking at other social sciences.
My copy of Karlan’s book
And on RCT itself, check out the link that my brother, a Cheap Ambien To Buy Online medical doctor and researcher, sent me. It is a Lancet article titled “A philosopher’s view of the long road from RCTs to effectiveness”. Remember, RCT has been in medical and pharmacological research for a while.
PS, I promised a Cheap Ambien To Buy Online while ago to blog a list of must read economic anthropology books. I should get to Cheap Ambien To Buy Online it pretty soon.
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