Ethics of sociological scouts

I have no idea how but for a week I became the survey’s interviewer and interviewed 25 peers about their plans for the university after-life. At Warwick, there seems to be quite a lot of energy devoted to generating responses of some sort or another through varied feedback forms, surveys and questionnaires. For example, whole February I have been continuously reminded about the National Student Survey not only through the constant stream of e-mails, but also through a steady supply of sweet and savoury bribes in our departmental common room, decorated with big, menacing posters promising five pounds if we fill out the survey.

The only thing I could provide to my interviewees was a chewing gum and a friendly ear. Not only is not always clear what impact any survey has but how do these questionnaires look from the other side? Is commercial market research compatible at all with the ethics training of a sociological scout?

Let’s start with the holy grail of ethical research: do no harm. That means that research has to pay attention to the wellbeing of its participants, for example avoiding too sensitive topics or anonymising the data so no one can be later identified. However, I was surprised when I found out that this survey was not in fact anonymous but people had to supply their e-mail, phone number and full name. Well, it’s true that later their whole personality has been reduced to few boxes which will be transformed into numbers for the sake of analysis, but still there was me. And it was obvious how uncomfortable some people were with answering some question, especially about political opinions, financial (so, how much did you say your debt will be this summer, in total?) or personal. For example, the damned question no. 35. What do you think you will have achieved by the age of 30? Own your own house? Earning hundreds of thousands? Their cringy laughter still rings in my ears. Out of 25 respondent only one answered that they are planning to have kids. Is this an actual reflection of reality – something the survey wants to supposedly do – or just a desperate, that’s none of your business? Maybe I am too sensitive but I felt ashamed that ‘my’ questionnaire makes them ashamed of their after-life ‘non’ plans – how there exist this perfect, mainstream expectations of graduates to have an internship(s) and then swiftly progress into the graduate jobs, but they are not really thinking about it yet. But they will, they promise. Is this a ‘real’ reality check, as someone said, or just a check of reality constructed by the university and the graduate employment industry? Well, in sociology everything is constructed but let’s not get into that.

By now I guess the reader understood that I do not count myself amongst many fans of quantitative or ticking methods, especially if the survey is not very well constructed. One of the reason is that human opinions cannot be limited to either-or. Lots of my respondents were frustrated when they had to choose only between two options. Yes. No. Agree. Disagree. Guess what was the most mentioned answer to this question: ‘Do you think your degree enhances your employability, gives you skills appreciated by employers?’ Well, I hope so. That depends, doesn’t it? But there is no space for real-life thinking. Instead, the university will be able to pat themselves on the back, saying ‘this and this many graduates believe xyz.’ But they don’t, not necessarily. The inherent problem of surveys are the forced dichotomies: do you think Ed Milliband would make a better PM than David Cameron? Yes. No. But don’t we have more alternatives than these two? What if both of them are dire? In the end, the company will be able to analyse the results as either-or. 50% with Ed, 50% against. However, this is not necessarily true, as I tried to show.

However, as guilty as I can be I must admit that after collecting very rich, qualitative data for my dissertation, talking to very different groups of local food project stakeholders, I kind of wish the survey world to be the real world. Food aid? Bad. Growing food? Good. But I guess it will be a little bit more complicated.