About Michael Hammond

I am interested in social research, new technology and education. I work at the University of Warwick.

Hunting sound

Posted on January 31, 2020 by Michael Hammond

I was researching technology and international exchange the other day and came across two stories in the history of technology which were new for me. The first concerned World Tape Pals [1]. This was an organisation set up in 1950 to encourage the sharing of news and perspectives from people around the world. A kind of discussion forum before its time. The technology used was recorded tapes and members not only stayed in touch with family living overseas but linked up with people they had not previous met to share culture and languages – they were ‘sound pals’ rather than ‘pen pals’. In the mid-1960s the World Tape Pals was reported to have about 25,000 members worldwide though of course many more people would have used tape recorded exchanges in informal ways.

The story of Word Tape Pals led me on to a couple of articles on sound hunters by Karin Bijsterveld [2] [3]. Simply put sound hunting was about capturing everyday life and was popular, although always a very niche activity, in the 1950’s and 1960’s. At the time people were asking what they could do with the new technology of the tape recorder. Suggestions from the early manufacturers included recording the gurgling of a new born baby; capturing conversations with family members; recording concerts; dictating letters and so on. Bijsterveld shows some of this in the publicity photographs which put out – a couple of them are reproduced below [4].

Ambitiously it was suggested that with these recorders you could produce your own radio plays, complete with special effects, or record yourself singing or practising a foreign language. But one further unexpected use of the technology was to ‘hunt sounds’. Sound hunters took out their devices – quite large and heavy reel to reel machines – and tried to record ‘how everyday life sounded’: the noise made by an aeroplane engine; thow laughter in the street; the song of garden birds; the ringing of church bells; in fact anything and everything. Clubs of sound hunters grew up and competitions, including a kind of sound hunter Olympics, took place in which international teams were given limited time to produce a fully documented sound collage around a common theme. These competitions were judged by level of difficulty and Bijsterveld (2004: 624) explains how one contestant, a salesman in wristwatches, set out to record the sound of wristwatches, for his five-minute production ‘Insomnia’:

During the recording each separate sound had to be isolated and subsequently much amplified, in order for it to be audible as a separate phenomenon on the magnetic tape… We did not succeed in fully suppressing the breathing and background noises …We tried for months and probably needed over 100 hours of work to realize these recordings.

My interest in sound hunters came about as I was simply amazed that this went on, on reflection I should not have been but it just appeared so whacky. Sound hunting is also interesting as it was a precursor and became entwined with more mainstream use of sound collage. For exmaple, in UK radio and television history you can sense the influence of sound hunting in the early radio series Radio Ballads [5] which aimed to collect songs, conversations and sound effects in a story of everyday life, and in the seminal use of sound mixing in the first Dr Who theme tune, 1963 [6].

Another reason why I found sound hunting so interesting was that it exemplified two of the ways we still respond to technology. First, the desire to capture everything (something today we see in our preoccupation with taking photos and monitoring how many steps we take). Second, the belief, pushed by manufacturers, that technology use will be creative even if this comes up against the reality that what is simpler or more instantly appealing takes over. In the case of sound hunting there was not enough to hold the attention, and in any case cassette recorders replaced reel to reel tapes and these were so much more difficult to access and edit. A further parallel between sound hunting and our attitudes to digital devices today is our belief that technology will break down international barriers only to find that they can also be used for control and surveillance. Bijsterveld (2013) provides a timely account of the first international sound hunter competition in 1972 in what was then a Warsaw Pact country, Czechoslovakia. Here the enthusiasts came up against eavesdropping by the security services and covert participation. This was capturing sound but with malice. Imagine such a thing!

References

[1] Scribner, C. (2017) American teenagers, educational exchange, and cold war politics. History of Education Quarterly 57(4) 542-569.

[2] Bijsterveld, K. (2004) ‘What do I do with my tape recorder …?’: Sound hunting and the sounds of everyday Dutch life in the 1950s and 1960s, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 24:4, 613-634.

[3] Bijsterveld, K. (2013) ‘Eavesdropping on Europe: The tape recorder and East-West relations among European recording amateurs in the Cold War era’. In (Eds) A. Badenoch and A. Fickers Airy Curtains in the European Ether, pp. 99-122. Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG.

[4] The source for the first is given by Bijsterveld as Grundig Radio Handelmaatschappij J.N.J. Sieverding N.V., Amsterdam 1962. The source for the second is the Photo Archives NVG, Wassenaar Courtesy Grundig Benelux. I believe I can reproduce these photos but apoligise for any inadvertent breach of copyright. The first is an early advertisement, the second shows a sound hunter in an air field.

soundhunting1 soundhunting2 .

[5] A brief description of Radio Ballads can be accessed at the BBC site

https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/radioballads/original/ but to be honest the Wikipedia entry is fuller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_ballad . It is not difficult to track down programmes on You Tube.

[6] The story of the theme tune is again covered by both the BBC but quite fully in Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_theme_music

Book of the year

Posted on December 20, 2019 by Michael Hammond

I spend so much time picking apart books and articles that it is a release to look back and think about what I had enjoyed reading this year, not necessarily something published in 2019 but just something I happened to read.

In respect to big ideas I went back again to Michael Polanyi’s ‘Personal knowledge’ [1]. Above all I like to read commentators who are trying to balance the idea of social research as something personal (i.e. we need to bring our own ideas to the research and as Polanyi would have it our passion) with something ‘objective’ (i.e. you cannot make it up, you can only say what the evidence let’s you say) and for me Polanyi (at least his earlier work) occupies this middle ground.

In the field of technology research I did not find anything quite so engaging but I did appreciate one article on city life that, in the words of the authors, provided,

‘a case study of informal learning and lifewide literacies amongst Glaswegian adults using three distinct approaches to data collection: a household survey capturing rich data on learning attitudes, behaviours, and literacies; GPS trails that track mobility around the city; and the capture of naturally occurring social media’ [2].

It was the work using GPS trails that I found interesting – volunteers used trackers as well as life-logging cameras and in this way researchers could see how their volunteers moved around the city. Thus they were able not just to understand attitudes to learning but they could access and to some extent observe what individuals were actually doing. In particular researchers saw an association between deprivation with reduced learning engagement (this was not surprising), but physical movement played a part too and could arguably assist in learning engagement as well as be an outcome of such engagement. There is much hype about the use of digital devices in social research but in this case their use worked and I expect there will be much more on the study of movement in the years ahead.

But in looking for a book that I really enjoyed reading it would have to be something more literary. One contender was Gavron’s ‘A Woman on the Edge of Time’ [3] in which the author tries to understand why his mother committed suicide, aged 29, when she had just had her first book published and had a career as a social scientist stretching out in front of her. Gavron looks for answers by tracking down the people in his mother’s life (not easy after so many years) and considers both internal make-up (e.g. his mother’s volatility) and external environment (e.g. the difficulties of forging an academic career in 1960s male-dominated academia). Gavron is not able to reach any definitive conclusions but at least he is able to make sense of his mother’s action. Thus the book is not only about a social scientist (his mother) but it is also a piece of social research (though I doubt if Gavron would accept the label) as it is asking questions about agency, gender stereotyping and how society both provides and limits opportunities.

I liked Gavron but my book of the year is Lily King’s fictional account of Margaret Mead doing fieldwork in New Guinea [4]. Mead was steely and consistent in challenging what US society took for granted and looking again at her book Coming of Age in Samoa [5] I saw more clearly that this was a comparative study of adolescence in USA and Samoa rather than a study of Samoa itself [6]. During her career Mead drew the ire of the Right for, as they saw it, undermining social conventions but she, or perhaps the tradition of anthropology she helped develop, became critiqued by the Left (and now by decolonising methodology[7] ) for doing research on people, rather than for people or with people and indeed some of her work feels very uncomfortable today (see an earlier blog on photography). We all need to find our own stance on this but I think Mead’s argument would be that she had come in good faith to describe what she saw and to talk about how her own society could learn from cultures which were much less known and so much less accessible than they are today.

Anyway to get back to the book, Lily King’s Euphoria, is about doing field work in New Guinea in 1933. Mead is working with her second husband, Reo Fortune – names have been changed (Mead becomes Nell and Fortune, Fen). Things are not going well when they meet fellow ethnographer Gregory Bateson (Bankson) at a Christmas party during a break from their work. Fen and Nell have been unable to complete their field work and Bankson, a lone researcher in another village, is lonely and out of his depth, so much so that he had already attempted suicide. Their encounter somehow spurs them, Mead and Fen find a more congenial village to research and Bankson sparks into life when he realises he is in love with Nell.

I really liked the book as it was about the doing of research. To be clear it is about privileged people, not the indigenous people, but it turns the tables by treating the researchers themselves as objects for analysis. In this way you can see Nell, Fen and Bankson’s strengths and weaknesses very clearly. For example, Mead comes over as an obsessive documenter of data and as someone who struggled with local languages so that she may have missed realising when the wool was pulled over her eyes. I particularly liked the figure of Bankson (I have presented the book as one about Mead but Bankson/ Bateson is a really important part of the story) with his buttoned up Englishness and moral seriousness.

I had some reservations not least as ethically it straddles a difficult space; it is clearly about Mead, Bateson and Fortune but names and settings have been changes and Lily King provides a very different ending for Nell (which I won’t reveal) than there was for Mead. This fictionalisation presents a particular problem in respect to Reo Fortune whose character Fen comes over as abusive in his relationship with Mead and an egoist or worse when carrying out a disastrous raid on another village in search of an artefact which would, if he could get his hands on it, make his reputation. I don’t know what Fortune was really like but this seems to be having it both ways, i.e. you can say things like this might well have happened but hide behind the fiction if challenged.

I also had a problem with the key passage in the book when the three ethnographers were actually doing some theorising about the cultures they were studying. The original section is too long to include here but one reviewer summarises it as follows:

‘In one frenzied night the trio put it all down on paper: an exhilarating scene of creative and intellectual gestation that captures all the excitement of discovery, and the promise that we might find a way to better understand humankind. Here is the euphoria of the title; that breakthrough in understanding – a moment of sudden and exhilarating clarity in the life of the artist or scientist. Nell, with her lyrical, near-poetic field notes, is as much artist as scientist, with an infectious capacity for liberating passion in those near her’ [8].

I have asked a lot of people about theorising and yes this captures the sense of release when it all comes together but Lily King makes it look much more like the kind of brainstorming that comes in at the start of a project, not at the end. But who knows perhaps she is being faithful to Mead’s own descriptions.

However this is to quibble. The book is well written and that rare thing edited with discipline so that you end up wanting more. The sections in which the characters express their thoughts in diary format work really well as it is natural that as researchers they would do this. The problems with classical ethnography or anthropology are there to see (the danger of exploitation, the privileged standpoint, the capacity to be hoodwinked, the loneliness and destabilisation) but this is not a simple put down, there is something admirable, at least in the case of Nell and Bankson, in their commitment to understanding other cultures and the critical distance they try to put between themselves and the societies in which they have been brought up. They come over as serious and humanist in their intentions. The point is that researchers are rooted in time and place as much as the people they research.

[1] Polanyi, M. (1958) Personal knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, Chicago, USA, University of Chicago Press.

[2] Lido, C., Reid, K. and Osborne, M. (2019) ‘Lifewide learning in the city: novel big data approaches to exploring learning with large-scale surveys, GPS, and social media’, Oxford Review of Education, 45, 2: 279-295.

[3] Gavron, J. (2015) A Woman on the Edge of Time: A Son’s Search for his Mother. Scribe Publications, London.

[4] King, L. (2014) Euphoria, London: Picador.

[5] Although I have cited Mead a lot during research methods course and had read ‘Growing up in Samoa’, I had not followed all the discussion around her work and the novel filled some gaps and pushed me to read further. There is quite a lot of video footage of Mead for example this BBC programme comes from 1976.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZDQSNkplTM

[6] Mead, M. (1928) Coming of Age in Samoa, New York: William Morrow. (This is accessible in the Internet Archive as well as via other web sites: https://archive.org/details/comingofageinsam00mead

[7] e.g. Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2012) Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London: Zed Books.

[8] Gibb, C. (2014) Euphoria by Lily King – the colourful love life of Margaret Mead, Guardian, 24 December, 2014 [online] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/24/euphoria-lily-king-review-margaret-mead-new-guinea

The ethics of social research

Posted on December 3, 2019 by Michael Hammond

I teach research methods courses and when it comes to sessions on ethics we normally go over the classics: Milgram’s experiments with obedience; the Stanford prison experiment; poor Alfred and the white rat [1]. All very startling but on the whole students do not get as excited as I do. I think this is first because most have heard of these stories before and second they know they could never do something as off-the-wall as these researchers. So they don’t always see the point in talking about them. Well the point, as I try to make clear, is that however extreme we find these cases today they did not seem so when they were carried out. For example, Milgram’s experiment in obedience became championed in counter cultural politics of the 1960’s and 1970 but as far as I know few people at the time said, ‘Hey wait a minute you cannot ask people to believe they are inflicting electric shock treatment just because you want to find out if they will do it!’.

So I don’t want to throw out the classics, but I would like to broaden my examples and find something a little less obvious. So it was that the other day I looked up Garfinkel’s reporting of experiments ‘in trust and stable actions’ in the early 1960’s [2]. First thing to say is that Garfinkel’s work was insightful. His career long research theme was the maintenance of order in social interactions and the role that conversation played in keeping a tight hold on the roles we could play and how we played them. To illustrate this passion we had for order in our relationships he asked (and it is not clear whether he merely suggested or told) his students to act in unexpected ways in keeping with the old adage, ‘if you want to understand something then try to change it’.

One of his examples was asking students to enter a store (or shop), to select a customer and treat the customer as a clerk (shop assistant) while giving ‘no recognition that the subject was any other person that the experimenter took him to be and without giving any indication that the experimenter’s treatment was anything other than perfectly reasonable and legitimate’. In the examples he describes the ‘subjects’ (or, let us be honest, the duped customers) becoming ‘nervous and jittery’, one was ‘flushed with anger’ and another ‘stalked out of the shop’. For good measure one volunteer student had a friend ‘a professor emeritus of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology’ (so that is alright then) who ‘begged to be allowed to accompany the student’ and joined in an experiment of his own.

Garfinkel followed these relatively mild and short term experiments with a more well-known one in which students were asked to spend from fifteen minutes to an hour in their home acting as ‘if they were boarders (lodgers)’; by this he meant they should act the role of being ‘circumspect and polite’, using ‘formal address and speaking only when spoken to’. He writes that out of 49 students, five refused to do it and 4 ‘were unsuccessful’ (i.e. they were willing but the circumstances did not seem right). But four fifths of the students did try the experiment and Garfinkel reports that family members were ‘stupefied’ and ‘vigorously sought to make the strange actions intelligible and to restore the situation to normal’. He elaborates that students’ reports were ‘filled with accounts of bewilderment, shock, anxiety, embarrassment, and anger, and with charges by various family members that the student was mean, inconsiderate, selfish, nasty, or impolite.’

There were however no cases in which the situation was not restorable after the student had explained what they were doing, but family members were angry. As for the students, they did not for the most part did not find the experiment difficult to carry out or particularly taxing.

For Garfinkel these examples worked, i.e. they showed we were made uncomfortable when what was taken for granted was disrupted. But were they ethical? No I don’t think so. They may have been comparatively mild cases but this was reckless for the families and for the students concerned and I would say that family members had it right when they complained that the students were ‘mean, inconsiderate, selfish, nasty, or impolite’. And this actually makes me question the conclusions to be drawn from the experiments, people may have been angry, not so much because they were over-committed to the maintenance of social order, but because the student volunteers were taking the piss; as one family member said to a student ‘we are not rats’. But my overarching complaint is why would you ever want to do social science in this way? Yes, if you want to understand something then do try to change it, but why not try to change it for the better. For example, there is all manner of research into what goes disastrously wrong in families and relationships and really worthwhile attempts to explain what helps in redressing an imbalance [3]. Ethically this seems where social research should be positioned.

[1] In Milgram’s experiment volunteers were told they were assisting in a learning experiment and told to administer an electric shock every time a learner made a mistake in a test (in fact there was no shock and the ‘learner’ was playing a part). The shock generator was marked from 15 volts (slight shock) to 450 (danger – severe shock). The study was about how far volunteers would go. See:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOUEC5YXV8U

In the Stanford prison experiment the psychology building was turned into a mock prison and 24 paid male volunteers were assigned roles of guard or prisoner in order to explore the impact of taking on a role on otherwise well adjusted men. Some got carried away in their role.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4txhN13y6A

The third example concerned Watson and classic conditioning. Little Albert was around 9 months old and exposed to different stimuli and showed no fear of any of small animals including a white rat. However the next time Albert was exposed to the rat the researcher made a loud noise and thereafter the child associated the noise with the rat and would cry on seeing it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hBfnXACsOI

[2] Garfinkel, H. (1963) ‘A conception of, and experiments with, ‘trust’ as a condition of stable concerted actions’, in O.J. Harvey (ed.) Motivation and Social Interaction: Cognitive Approaches, New York: Ronald Press.

[3] As one example, Yoshihama, M. (2002) ‘Breaking the web of abuse and silence: Voices of battered women in Japan’, Social Work, 47, 4: 389-400.

Academic writing retreats: are they worth it?

Posted on December 3, 2019 by Michael Hammond

The university in which I work puts on two-day writing retreat events – these are not residential but just an opportunity to work on something in a dedicated space, in the presence of colleagues all doing their own writing. I try to go to these when I can, I find I can concentrate better in a room in which everyone else is writing too. For that matter there is nothing else to do except write, so you write. I notice too that people tend to come back to follow-up events so something is clearly working.

In addition to these internal events I have been three or four times to a week-long residential writing retreat. This is organised independently and it attracts some academics but probably the majority are working on fiction – poetry, novels, short stories. A lot of colleagues have asked me if going away like this is worthwhile and yes I would say it is. But before saying more, the concept of writing retreat needs some clarification. Some universities put on focused, structured events – they are called retreats but they are really organised residentials – around writing for publication. It seems from reviews carried out [1] that what academics like about these events is protected time, having other people around and getting some input from mentors. There is little negative comment in the literature but I would guess that you need to make a residential voluntary as anyone who has to go, rather than wants to go, is likely to be very grumpy. The advice given for those organising a residential is to think of it as a process, rather than a one-off. In other words: prepare; run the event; follow up with participants afterwards. This means getting participants to work something up in advance, let them discuss work in progress with mentors at the event and, crucially, go back to participants afterwards and monitor what they have done and offer more support. Little to argue against here and the kind of thing that is organised from time to time for students as well.

But what about the unstructured writing retreat, the type where people go away somewhere quiet and simply get on with it, what do people get out of them? Like the structured ones earlier I think the main attraction is protected time to work on some writing. However, there are some fairly obvious reasons why they do not appeal to many academics, in particular:

if you are short of time to write it may not make sense to spend any of the time you do have in travelling to a retreat.
some academics have very comfortable arrangements for writing at home.
money – if it is not organised by the university then you will need to pay for yourself, and to be honest it feels like paying for the privilege of doing your job, no matter how pleasant the surrounding are.
squaring it with others – if you are away a lot for your work your family will not react kindly if you go away for another chunk of time especially if out of term time.

Added to all this, I would say that for myself a writing retreat sounded really self-indulgent and I think a surprisingly large number of colleagues would feel the same way. This raises a larger question of academic identity; being an academic is supposed to include writing but this is very hard to prioritise given all the other demands on our time. Writing is in any case so uncertain (you don’t know for sure if it will ever be published and who will ever read it?) but teaching and administration is not (you get it done and it is there for all to see). Certainly, I would not have gone on a retreat if I did not have some teaching award prize money I could use. It was not the money, but the legitimation I needed.

It tuned out that I enjoyed the peace and quiet of the retreat- it was a small group with masses of room in the house where we stayed – and the routine of early morning walking, breakfast, lunch, cake, dinner broke up the writing really well; instead of thinking I had a whole day in front of a screen I could work around two hour blocks. I liked the mix of writers and the thing I was most worried about (there might not be other academics, or at least no academics in my field) turned out to be the thing I most liked. I got a lot of work done, much more than I thought I would, and much more than I had succeeded in doing anywhere else. I did feel undeservedly cossetted from everyday concerns but, hey, it is surprising what you can get used to. I have been back since, I try to do so once a year in order to reinforce some of the helpful habits for writing I picked up. However I would not want to do more than that as I want it to be a bit special.

So perhaps you might want to give writing retreat some thought. If so, first work out if it is an organised or non-organised event, or perhaps something in between that you want. Sometimes organisers will suggest you share your work in progress but I don’t think that will ever happen unless expectations are clear in advance. Plan what you want to get done. If you could really prepare thoroughly then I expect you are so well organised there might not be much point in going away to write. So realistically for most people planning will mean finding a moment to decide beforehand if you want to use the time to [a] get your head around a topic by reading around it and note taking; [b] complete a draft of something that you have already started; or [c] focus on something that has been hanging around for some time, perhaps something that is especially taxing and the retreat is a reward for getting it done.

I would also advise to ask yourself if you are really looking for a holiday rather than a writing retreat. In fact, there are many summer writing retreats on Mediterranean islands and in idyllic Nordic forests advertised on the web, these are fine as holiday destinations but if you want to go on holiday then go on holiday and if you want to write then write, both are fine but not at the same time. Finally, don’t worry about anyone else. The point of a retreat is that other people have their own things to do, they are not really interested in you or your work; you can look vacant and lost in thought but that is OK as they are similarly distracted. They won’t mind it if you talk about your work, and they might talk about theirs, but only at the right time. I suppose good advice is finally to research places to go as far a you can – actually I did not but it turned out fine.

[1] Rowena Murray amongst others has discussed retreats over a number of years as well as issues of academic identity e.g. Murray R. (2008) Writer’s retreat: reshaping academic writing practices. Educational Developments, 9(2):14-16.

In praise of theorising

Posted on June 17, 2019 by Michael Hammond

[This entry supports a recent talk on the subject to research students]

Over the last couple of years I became interested in theory and theorising in social research. I have done this not because I started with a great deal of confidence, or indeed background knowledge, of theory as a concept but, quite the reverse, an awareness of a gap in my understanding. However as I got into the topic I noticed that other colleagues struggle with the concept too and this gave me the push to continue looking into this area. [1]

A logical starting point in trying to understand theory was to get an idea of the core claims made for theory and for me this comes back to language; theoretical concepts provide the language we use to organise our thinking about something. This seems quite slight a contribution but it isn’t, for once you can name a thing you can think about and act on it. For example when you visit another country and don’t understand the language you cannot express thoughts, share ideas, or enter into a social world. Of course the frustrating thing here is that you have the concepts but cannot express them, but imagine not being able to give name to the concepts in the first place. Language is absolutely core to what we are as human beings and theorising is a language activity.

Of course when it comes to theorising we can get by without the kind of obsession that social researchers often bring to naming and debating theories but theses obsessions comes from a desire to push boundaries.

Theories can be bigged up but this does not need to be the case. For example in education research Vygotsky introduced the idea of a zone of proximal development (ZPD) – the difference between what a learner understands at present and what a learner can do with the support of a more knowledgeable other [2]. This concept helps organise the work of a teacher by focusing attention on gaps in the learners’ understanding; what is the learner ready to grasp; and how can the learner be best supported. Setting it out in this way you might say isn’t a ZPD obvious as a concept? Well yes, but it only appears obvious as someone named it in the first place.

Theories come in different forms [3] and much of the problem many of us have with theory is that the same word covers different ideas. Theory could, for example, be about introducing a new concept, but for some it could also be about modelling relationships between variables. Theoretical contributions can also cover the study of key thinkers, ideas about how we should see the world or how we should carry out research into understanding the world [4].

One of the problems, or at least challenges, that arises in talking about theory is that people do not understand that other people might use theory in a different way to themselves. For some researchers explanatory theory is about noticing and explaining cause and effect, if X then people tend to do Y. In contrast, other researchers might want to understand why people behave as they do and, rather than say what causes such behaviour, they are interested in explaining the consequences – if people act like X then Y is likely to be an outcome. Thus it not surprising that we all struggle with the word theory and in vivas the question ‘what is your theoretical contribution?’ is such an unsettling question as the student is having to second guess what the examiner means [5]. [Of course the examiner can help here by clarifying what he or she has in mind, but the student can also be proactive and set out what they see as a theoretical contribution too]. Theory can end up becoming a stick to beat up other researchers (you don’t understand X, you have misapplied Y, you have not read Z) which can be quite misplaced as few theories lend themselves to easy interpretation.

In spite of its different associations I think when it comes to theory there is a common idea that theory should explain and not be ‘merely’ descriptive. Just as in natural science, the models and formulae that some social scientists put forward can offer good representations of what is happening but they are not properly theories if they don’t say how it all fits together [6]. In putting forward an explanation theorists should have a broader idea about the way that human being behave – as sociologists put it an engagement with agency and structure. For example, Bourdieu’ s idea that there are different kinds of capital (social, cultural and economic) which shape social activity would be a model, a useful model but an underdeveloped one, without the accompanying ideas of habitus (how our life experiences develop within us habits, skills, and dispositions) and field (implicit and explicit rules of behavior, and valuations put on that behaviour in particular sites of activity) [7]. Likewise Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems approach (the idea that the individual exists within interlocking micro, macro, exo, meso systems, some of which are directly experiences, some are not) would be much less without Bronfenbrenner’s view that the point of social development was to develop personal agency [8].

Another point about theories is that they are transferable. Theorists seek to abstract out what is important in a situation and so let others apply and of course reinterpret these theories in other contexts. Theories seem to integrate different findings and there is, in both natural and social science, a view that theories should often provide the least complicated explanation. For example Einstein’s theory of relativity is so thought provoking as it is expressed so simply (E=MC^2) and more recently in economics Piketty’s (cited earlier) formula r>g (where r is the rate of return on capital and g economic growth) captures something about wealth and inequality so elegantly that Piketty has an audience beyond the field of economics. Maybe we exaggerate the value of simplicity but at a pragmatic level theories which try to tell too much are difficult to apply.

If theory is complicated then so too is theorising. According to Swedberg, theorising is what you do when you make a theory. For Swedberg theorising is speculating and theorising calls for a mix of logic, intuition and creativity – a different way of thinking [9]. Swedberg draws on the pragmatic thinker Peirce who introduced the term abduction to capture the kind of intuitive guesswork we use when reaching for an explanation. The metaphor of the detective is irresistible here and indeed Peirce’s account of guessing draws on his experience of tracking down a watch – a very expensive watch that had been loaned to him. In his account Peirce seems to have a sixth sense as to who stole the watch and relies more on a hunch to identify the thief rather than on logic or deduction. [10]

Conan Doyle’s detective Sherlock Holmes provides another metaphor for guessing, that of detective work. Famously, on meeting Watson for the first time, Holmes says ‘ah you have come from Afghanistan’. Watson wants to know how Holmes had guessed this. Holmes explains:

Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan. [11]

Here there is a leap of imagination that brings various observations together around a broader idea. The problem is that the account is fictional and indeed the Holmes stories are popular as they are comforting (truth will come out) when in reality many different hunches or guesses are possible based on the same data. Indeed there were many other ways to account for the appearance of Watson than he had just come from Afghanistan, but that would spoil the story. An additional source of confusion in Holmes is that his methods are described as deduction, but they read more like abduction in Peirce’ sense [12].

A further metaphor for theorising is that of the investigative journalism. For example, Stacey Dooley as a documentary film maker models the reflection needed for theorising very well. She also asks the difficult questions which a social researcher needs to do without antagonising her interviewees. Once the interviews are over she steps back and questions the significance of what she has heard in a way that the qualitative researcher might understand. She often finds no easy solutions or conclusions [13].

Detective work and investigative journalism only take you so far as metaphors, social researchers may make hunches, be obsessive about their inquiries, and go round in circles but a crucial difference is that social researchers have to engage in a very self-conscious way with what has been said about a topic or an idea in the past. In discussing their methods researchers such as Wright Mills [14] and Eco [15] show how much they value past literature and take detailed notes on all that they have read. They see theorising as a kind of shuttling between the data they have collected and the theories they have explored.

The idea of comparing data to theory is helpful to describe theorising in academic contexts and Michael Polanyi sheds further light. Polanyi believed that in coming to know something we need to switch between focal (the goal of the activity) and subsidiary awareness (the particular features of an activity). (Focal awareness might be the message we want to convey, and subsidiary awareness the grammatical structures we use to construct the message). Polanyi suggested that we can only really engage with the focal once we have worked really hard on the particulars. The paradox is that we need to background the subsidiary in order to see the focal but this can be done only by putting a great deal of effort into mastering what is subsidiary in the first place. Once we do seem able to gain a focal attention it is very difficult to look back at the subsidiary. This is the idea of tacit knowledge, things we know but find difficult to say – for example the experienced driver who cannot tell you what he or she does when driving a car, or the native language speaker who uses but cannot explain the grammatical forms they are using when speaking. [16]

Polanyi is useful as he shows that theorising is a huge challenge as it requires a step change in the way we think. However, this step change cannot be forced as we need to know in detail what we are theorising about. Perhaps because theorising is such a challenge, and to a degree a process of forgetting, researchers often describe theoretical breakthroughs as a revelation – they get very excited when it all falls into place. As a example a recent review of Silent Spring [17] cites Rachel Carson reflecting on her ‘aha moment’ – this is the moment when she can see the disparate data she has on environmental destruction fits into a pattern – the over use of pesticides such as DDT. Carson, like others, uses the metaphor of the jigsaw puzzle:

Recently some of my thinking on all this has begun to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle … a great light is breaking in my mind’

and she adds

I have a comforting feeling that what I shall now be able to achieve is a synthesis of widely scattered facts, that have not heretofore been considered in relation to each other. It is now possible to build up…a really damning case against the use of these chemicals as they are now inflicted upon us.’ [18]

I don’t think it is possible to legislate for the kind of thinking that theorising captures but I can make some suggestions. If trying to theorise it is surely a good idea to step back physically from the data, literally go outside and just think what is the central idea in all you have been looking at. Try to notice what lies behind what you have found out. Try talking to other people about your ideas, they wont listen to you, but rehearse what is running through your head. Be kind on yourself, don’t assume what you have found is unimportant or not worth knowing, it usually is. Compare your central idea to the literature but be critical of the literature. Try to notice the gaps or things that are not being said. I hear a lot from students who say they have not really understood something they have read, they don’t quite get it. But it could be that they don’t get it because there is something in the literature that is missing, not ‘getting it’ might be a really important step to some new insight. If you want to be more organised in theorising try looking too at the same data through different perspectives, a kind of theoretical triangulation. Few people do this but it can be illuminating [19] .

Finally whatever you do, be kind to yourself, this is hard. Try to be gently assertive, put forward your ideas and be open about how you came to reach your conclusions. Argue persuasively but with kindness. Accept there are other ways to look at the data. It is not self-indulgence to theorise if you are a social researcher, it is the job.

[1] I have written about this in Hammond, M. (2018). ‘An interesting paper but not sufficiently theoretical’: What does theorising in social research look like?Methodological Innovations May- August 2018: 1-10.

[2] See for example Van der Veer, R. and J. Valsiner (1994). The Vygotsky Reader. Oxford, England, Blackwell.

[3] See for example Abend, G. (2008). The meaning of ‘theory’. Sociological Theory,26(2): 173-199 and Krause, M. (2016). The meanings of theorizing. The British Journal of Sociology,67(1): 23-29.

[4] Most articles will fit into these categories, in the talk I gave we looked at Davis, F. (1989). Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology. MIS Quarterly, 13(3), 319–340 as an example of modelling; Fuchs, C. (2015). Reading Marx in the Information Age: A media and communication studies perspective on capital. London: Routledge as an example of interrogating key thinkers; Piketty, T. (2015). About capital in the twenty-first century. American Economic Review, 105(5), 48-53 as an example of drawing attention to a relationship between variables; Rawls, J. (2009). A Theory Of Justice.MA: Harvard University Press as an example of speculating on what should happen; Reay, D. (2004). Gendering Bourdieu’s concepts of capitals? Emotional capital, women and social class. The Sociological Review, 52(2_suppl), 57-74 as an example of developing a new concept.

[5] See for example the aptly titled Kiley, M. (2015). I didn’t have a clue what they were talking about’: PhD candidates and theory. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 52(1): 52-63.

[6] Here we looked as an example at Banerjee, A. V., Cole, S., Duflo, E., & Linden, L. (2007). Remedying education: Evidence from two randomized experiments in India. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 122(3), 1235-1264. This was a study about using support teachers to support children falling behind in schools in India. It was well written and drew out data on achievement. Unlike some experimental studies it did offer an explanation for the success of an intervention but this was underdeveloped.

[7] There is a mass of work on Bourdieu but on forms of capital see for example Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital in J. Richardson (ed) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. NY, USA: Greenwood 241-258 as well as examples of applying the theory creatively in for example Reay earlier and Williams, S. (1995). Theorising class, health and lifestyles: can Bourdieu help us?, Sociology of Health & Illness 17(5): 577-604.

[8] Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The Ecology of Human Development, MA, USA: Harvard University Press.

[9] Swedberg is insightful throughout see for example:

Swedberg, R. (2015). “Before Theory Comes Theorizing or How to Make Social Science More Interesting, British Journal of Sociology 2015 Annual Public Lecture.” [online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34DME7lCe1I

Swedberg, R. (2016). Before theory comes theorizing or how to make social science more interesting.The British Journal of Sociology 67(1): 5-22

Swedberg, R. (2016). Can you visualize theory? On the use of visual thinking in theory pictures, theorizing diagrams, and visual sketches. Sociological Theory34(3): 250-275.

[10] Peirce’s ideas of guessing can be found in his collected works ( 1907, ca., Guessing. MS 687) and the account of the watch is in a republished article Peirce, C. (1929) Guessing, The Hound and Horn, 2, 267-282

[11] Conan Doyle (1887) see also discussion in Sebok (1981) and Walton (2015).

Conan Doyle, A. (1887). A Study in Scarlet, Project Gutenberg [online]. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/244/244-h/244-h.htm.

Sebok, T., & Umiker-Sebok, J. (1981). You Know My Method; A juxtaposition of Charles S. Peirce and Sherlock Holmes. Indiana, USA: Gaslight Publications and more analytically Walton, D. (2015). Argument Evaluation and Evidence. Cham, CH: Springer.

[12] The fashion now is to show the detective can overlook what is important, and does not get it right without a great deal of backtracking, as in Wallender, Spiral, The Bridge

Wallender: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Wallander

Spiral: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_(TV_series)

The Bridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bridge_(2011_TV_series)

[13] For example The Billion Pound Party – Stacey Dooley Investigates The DUP [online] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBNY8rhng6E

[14] Mills, C. W. (1959). The Sociological Imagination. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

[15] Eco, U. (2015). How to Write a Thesis. MA: MIT Press.

[16] Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Chicago, USA: University of Chicago Press.

[17] Crist, M. (2019). “Rachel Carson’s Forebodings.” London Review of Books 41(11).

[18] Carson, R. (1962). Silent Spring. MA, USA, Houghton Miff.

[19] Jackson, A. Y. and L. Mazzei (2011). Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing data across multiple perspectives, London: Routledge is unusual in looking at the same data from different standpoints (including Derrida; Foucault; Butler; and Delueze). Mol (2002) The Body Multiple, Duke University Press is an interesting example as the authors separate out the empirical and the theoretical in a study that looks at the day-to-day diagnosis and treatment of atherosclerosis in a Dutch hospital.

Is it few or less people?

Posted on June 17, 2019 by Michael Hammond

I have to read a lot of essays and theses recently and notice that I am getting a obsessive about the ‘correct’ use of language. I don’t like myself for it as I consider myself as flexible and tolerant about the way that language is used. More specifically, I think language rules should be descriptive rather than prescriptive, i.e. they should describe how the language is used rather than how it should be used. This means that if I was a rich man is normal (rather than the subjunctive if I were), and less people is OK now that fewer is falling into disuse. There is always power bound up with language, and over zealous interpretation of language rules is an effective way for those with cultural power to discount the voices of some people – for if people cannot express themselves correctly why should we listen to them? [1].

So it is no good being too pedantic but following rules is important for it is really quite disruptive when a writer breaks the rules – for example the switching of US and English spelling such as practice / practise and program / programme or numbers written as both digits (10) and in full (ten) at different points in a text. But it is also the breaking of the rules in the first place which distracts. For example I know academic colleagues who are quite OK about contractions in a text (isn’t, couldn’t, won’t) but I find contractions hold me up – I suddenly notice the form of what is being said rather than the idea itself. And of course being stopped in your tracks is frustrating. I realise, of course, that if we all stuck rigidly to expectations around language then nothing would change. After all, it does not really matter in terms of meaning whether you contract is not or could not and, going further, would it really matter if we got rid of apostrophes completely as we could understand the meaning from context. But for the moment I want to follow the rules.

Typos are disruptive too but they a different matter. They are not about wanting to change the rules but just things you missed. They are inevitable [2]. For example with a colleague I have just finished writing a book about education research, as writers we checked each other’s work and later my partner kindly read the whole thing. The book was then proof read formally by the publisher, yet when it came back there were still a number of typos and for that matter one ‘howler’. These have been amended but there will be others we missed even after all this combined checking. I try not to worry as most people will miss them too and will be forgiving but it is distressing how typos leap of the page when you finally read a finished text. The good thing about Blogs is that mistakes are forgiven, they can also be rectified.

[1] One of the interventions I recall reading came from Labov (1972) Academic Ignorance and Black Intelligence writing about value judgements on the way that inner-city children in USA speak. This is archived in several places including

[online] https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/95sep/ets/labo.htm

[2] A recent blog Academic Oscura makes me feel better [online] http://www.academiaobscura.com/oops/

Hirsch and Education

Posted on April 2, 2019 by Michael Hammond

In looking at intolerance in public debate I found several people recommending that we went out and took time to engage with ideas that we know, or think we know, we will disagree with. In this spirit I wanted to look at conservatives on education and I turned first to Hirsch.

It was easy to identify Hirsch as one of the key voices in conservative thinking. His best seller ‘The Schools We Need’ [1] was a key text and was often seen as inspiring Michael Gove when he was in charge of the education in England. So what did Hirsch say?

Like most critics who want us to radically change something he felt he had to make the case that it was all going pear-shaped. Here he is writing about USA but it is the kind of thing that is repeated time and time again by anyone proposing change in any system:

Take a young boy or girl from a typical American family who goes to a typical American school, and imagine that child growing up in France or Germany, Japan or Taiwan. Few would choose to make the experiment. Most Americans believe, as do I, that this country, with its traditions of political freedom and its generous optimism, is the greatest country in the world. But the evidence is strong that that very same young child would grow up more competent in those other countries than in the United States–through having learned much, much more at school in the early grades. Although our political traditions and even our universities may be without peer, our K-12 education is among the least effective in the developed world. Its controlling theories, curricular incoherencies, and what I call its ‘naturalistic fallacies’ are positive barriers to a good education. Scholars from abroad who study American schools are astonished that our children, who score very low in international comparisons, are actually as competent as they manage to be.

What is going wrong for Hirsch is an achievement gap; USA children are falling behind children in other countries and as he later argues it is more socially disadvantaged children who are falling even more behind. Why is this? For Hirsch education in the USA is overly influenced by ‘discredited’ theories of education based on a romantic view of childhood and an anti-knowledge culture in schools.

This is playing to his conservative audience. However what makes Hirsch a powerful protagonist is that he tries to make a pragmatic case for reform. For example he calls out the knee-jerk responses that both political conservatives and liberals make about education and argues that it is possible to take arguments about education on their merits; he describes himself as socially liberal but educationally conservative. He also claims his agenda is concerned not with selection but with underachievement among the socially disadvantaged, including disproportionate numbers of black children, and wants all children to succeed. He proposes a common curriculum, rather than free market solutions such as Charter schools. Hirsch argues too that all children need to gain the ability to read write and communicate clearly, and unless they have the same kind of core knowledge of nature and culture, then they will not be able to participate fully in society and will not enjoy better economic prospects.

Core knowledge is the thing for Hirsch and teaching this core knowledge is more important than so called generic skills, or higher order skills. Hirsch argues that all advanced skills rest upon prior knowledge and without grounding in core knowledge children do not have a hook on which to hang new ideas. Not surprisingly he is critical too of the argument that technology has made memorisation and knowledge of facts redundant; there are things we do need to commit them to memory. Finally, he argues that on practical grounds that schemes of work should be specific as to content so that children have a common experiences on which to build when they move classes or, as often happens, when they move school.

Hirsch is at his most persuasive when he is pragmatic. He agues, at least at times, not for one approach instead of another but a rebalancing so that there is more direct teaching and less project work. He is open to change in the curriculum to reflect multi-cultural society but such change should not detract from rigour or undermine a common curriculum. He values memorisation but he is not basing his educational ideas on the kind of crass behaviourism beloved by some conservative thinkers and recognises that the mind is a complex thing; teaching approaches such as phonics are not an end in themselves but needed for other academic skills to develop. He accepts that learners ‘construct’ their ideas, they subjectively interpret what they are given and actively try to make sense of it for themselves. However such constructivism does not mean there is a particular pedagogical approach that should be followed, you can be a good constructivist learner in an instructional class as easily as in a project class. He does not like individualisation or new fangled ideas such as personalisation of the curriculum and does not like the idea of learning styles.

So what was it worthwhile to explore something I knew I would not agree with? Well, yes as I learnt not to lump conservatism in education with the specific political programmes put forward by Conservative parties, particularly in UK and USA. I discovered that conservatism is really about handing down the past to a new generation. As such it can cut across the political divide – for example Hannah Arendt [2] who was a liberal philosopher was unexpectedly conservative on education matters and had no truck with ‘progressive’ education. Her point was that she wanted teachers to be in authority and feel their authority in the classroom. What I liked in Hirsch was a passion for education and a reaffirmation of the importance of academic knowledge as something that really helped you to think and achieve in life. What I didn’t like was the idea that it was all going wrong – really everywhere and every day?.

I didn’t mind the hard-headed approach when it came to knowledge but you can see how Hirsch could be taken as advocating a diet of rote learning, which is very wrong. He needed to say how the kind of instructional teaching he likes can engage children and what kind of balance should there be between instruction and more flexible guided practice. We also need to know how all this instructional teaching can lead later to free expression of ideas. He is pretty much hands-off as regards curriculum reform, but why not move the curriculum into areas which have more relevance or hold more interest to young learners.

Hirsch is least persuasive when cherry picking evidence and making sweeping generalisation. That was just annoying. For him education professors are fighting battles of long ago: they are all of one mind, they have little intellectual rigour and standing, and they do not tolerate dissent. I have not lived in USA but the US education academics I have met were, like most academics everywhere, geeky and obsessive about teaching and learning rather than consistently ‘progressive’.

So the exercise in this case was worthwhile. I could see much better what lay behind Hirsch’s ideas but I was not a convert.

[1] Hirsch, E. D. (2010). The Schools We Need: and Why We Don’t Have Them. NY, USA, Anchor.

[2]Arendt, H. (1961 / 1977). Between Past and Present. London: Penguin.

Does Virtual Reality work for education?

Posted on June 1, 2018 by Michael Hammond

Back to more familiar territory: technology. The other week our research centre put on a morning event about virtual reality. Much of it was new for me but the questions it posed about what to do with new technology were familiar ones.

So what is VR? One definition I liked came from Lavalle [1] for whom VR was about tricking our senses to feel we were present in a computer simulated world. I liked the idea of ‘tricking the senses’ as this suggest that there is something more intense going on than if you were playing around within a ‘two dimensional world’ in, say, Second Life or the Sims. But it also suggests that there is, with the best will in the world, a deceit going on. Key to understanding this deceit is that VR provides a world with depth (technically the three dimensional feel works by a process of ‘stereopsis’ – presenting a separate picture to each eye) and one without boundaries (objects remain stationary while you interact and move around however you like). A good question is ‘who is the ‘you’ in all this?’. Are you yourself or are you a mental model of yourself, perhaps an Avator or other form of on screen presence.

To get the idea of VR find someone with an appropriate Smart phone and head set. Alternatively there are thousands of examples on YouTube – presented in flat 2D video clips but they give the idea of what is possible. For example:

Clouds of Sydria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUosdCQsMkM

VR Goggles Gender Swap Experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCprfChibTE

Our First Look at Kraken Unleashed VR Coaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYv8qH1wZj4

Birdly: The Dream of Flying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYPJLRVrC18

Chess: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sRt5t8eA4w&frags=wn

BeAnotherLab experiments with gender identity

Of these examples two – the Clouds of Sydria and gender swap – were about stepping into the shoes of ‘the other’. These intrigued me, though how far you can be tricked into really taking on another identity, even temporarily, is an open question. One, the theme park idea, crossed over into the world of augmented reality as the computer experience was meant to work synchronously with the physical roller coaster ride. It was probably close to the very last thing I would want to do but I could see the enthusiasm it promoted. The birdly example was about experiencing something in a 3D world that was impossible in our physical world. I liked it and wonder how far it could give us the sensation of flying. The chess example was about showing off the technology but I think any chess player would find it distracting and pointless. What is missing in my examples are more conventional online game environments and for that matter sex industry applications which in their separate ways figure significantly in the early adoption of technology, but I wanted to focus on the more mainstream. In fact VR is increasingly mainstream as you can see in the ways it is sold by Smart Phone providers, for example the Samsung Ostrich Commercial [2]. It is also interesting to see big budget films, most recently Speilberg’s Ready Player One [3], engaging with the concept of VR.

So is VR relevant for education?

It struck me how discussion of VR in education feels similar to discussion of any technology in the past. That is to say the technology is generally developed in the wider world and then educators react by finding things to do with it. This is not meant as a criticism. It would be sad if educationalists were not thinking about how the world is changing, and how those changes can be put to use, but it does suggest that the cross over into education is not straightforward. As regards VR we are at the stage of ‘early adoption’ and you can see early examples of VR applications in an education context [4] as well as a number of Ted talks promoting VR as a (possible) solution to engagement of young people [5]. Much of the rhetoric around VR, as with other technologies in the past, refers to young people’s supposed preference for technology and the sheer range of contexts that would not be accessed without VR (e.g. via VR you can visit an ancient civilisation, go up into space, travel around the human body). There is also the idea that VR experiences are more intense and thus more memorable than other online ones or even ones in the physical world. Put like this we may expect to see VR taken up more and more. But in practice technology, and there is no reason for VR to be any different, runs up against considerable barriers including ones of access, curriculum and training. All this leads to a growing realisation that the visions for technology held by enthusiasts are not universally held.

So what future does VR have in education? First it is going to take a while to overcome access issues. Even if many learners bring their own smart phones this is not creating a classroom where everyone has kit which is fast, reliable and compatible with the software. You cannot as a teacher turn up assuming everything is in place, you are still talking of niche contexts for the foreseeable future. But supposing you really could access VR as and when you wanted to, would it be worth it? I can see possibilities. For example short episodes of VR that would give a unique insight into an environment. But the key thing to remember here is that education is not about the experience but telling a story about the experience. So what you are after is not a class that had memorable experiences of, say, walking with dinosaurs [6] but students who can ask questions such as: does this VR application offer faithful representations of prehistoric worlds? Do these animals bear likenesses to ones we see today? How do animals adapt to change ecologies?

I would also like to see more questioning of claims about the intensity of the experience. For example via VR you can step into someone else shoes but, let us face it. it is not for real. You may be more aware of what it is like to be a refugee and that might be important and valuable to your developing sense of who you are, but it is all temporary. Finally, VR adoption is not helped by health concerns. Of course such concerns have always popped up with new technology. I remember teaching spreadsheets years ago and there was always someone who said that the screens made them feel dizzy. It was easy, if wrong, to dismiss this. But VR headsets do seem to create problems on a wider scale and these might not be so easy to ignore.

[1] Lavalle, S. (2016) Virtual Reality [online] http://vr.cs.uiuc.edu

[2] The Samsung Ostrich Commercial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEEVu4w5LTE

[3] Ready Player One trailer at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVDE6-e96yY

[4] You can see some thinking about VR in higher education at: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2016/3/the-promise-of-virtual-reality-in-higher-education

[5] This Ted talk, led by Michael Bodekaer looks at VR in Science education https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_bodekaer_this_virtual_lab_will_revolutionize_science_class

[6] VR dinosaurs at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DLPWe5KHLY

Do the drugs work?

Posted on March 7, 2018 by Michael Hammond

I was struck the other day by the reporting in the press of an academic paper on antidepressants and their impact [1]. According to these reports antidepressants were now officially verified as very effective and should be taken by more people. But was this really what the study was saying? This is the story.

In the paper Cipriani et al (2018) argued, on the basis of a systematic review of the evidence, that: ‘All antidepressants were more efficacious, though some more efficacious than others, than placebo in treating adults with major depressive disorders’. There were important qualifications. The review was looking at short-term effects; it was not being claimed that anti-depressants worked better than other treatments; gains came with side effects; the gains were at times modest. But nonetheless there was an impact. There was less about implications for practice in the paper so I went to the press release from the University in which the lead author was based to see if I had missed something. In the release the implications were summed up as:

‘Antidepressants can be an effective tool to treat major depression, but this does not necessarily mean that antidepressants should always be the first line of treatment. Medication should always be considered alongside other options, such as psychological therapies, where these are available. Patients should be aware of the potential benefits from antidepressants and always speak to the doctors about the most suitable treatment for them individually.’ [2]

The reporting in the press was however quite different from this press release and can best be described as victory narrative about the power of science to solve whatever ails us, in this case major depression. This narrative was carried across the UK press and, I think, was taken up internationally as well. To turn to the UK, the left leaning Guardian proclaimed in an opinion piece: ‘It’s official: antidepressants are not snake oil or a conspiracy – they work’. The author of the piece summed up the research by saying ‘we should get on with taking and prescribing them’ [3]. The Times led with ‘More people should get pills to beat depression. Millions of sufferers would benefit, doctors told’ [4]. The Independent went further ‘Doctors should prescribe more antidepressants for people with mental health problems, study finds’. And the same article went as far as to claim ‘Research from Oxford University, which was published in The Lancet, found that more than one million extra people would benefit from being prescribed drugs and criticised “ideological” reasons doctors use to avoid doing so.’[5]. This left the Mail, which can usually be relied upon to offer the most far-fetched take on evidence based practice, looking quite mainstream. It suggested that ‘Millions MORE of us should be taking antidepressants: Largest-ever study claims the pills DO work and GPs should be dishing them out. [6]

I have nothing of value to say about the treatment of depression [7] but I am familiar with systematic studies, particularly in education. Their obvious value is that they tell you something really useful about the sweep of evidence (here that antidepressants tend to work better than placebos) and their scope makes their findings intuitively convincing (Cipriani et al aggregated over 500 studies and included over 100,000 patients). Systemic reviews are not however reliable guides as to what to do in individual cases as they are focused on the general picture. Further, systematic review might establish a measure of correlation but doesn’t tend to engage deeply in saying why doing X might work better than doing Y. Systematic reviews are only as good as the studies they aggregate. Here some argue that the whole field of medical research is distorted by pharmaceutical funding which makes any reported research unreliable. However this was not the stance of Cipriani et al and their research was independently funded. Instead a more widespread criticism of systematic review is that the case studies they access are often stilted to showing impact quite simply as the ones that show no impact are a lot less interesting to write, let alone publish. At least this is how it often looks in education.

Whatever we think about systematic review, the press went way beyond what was presented in the Cipriani et al paper and, in doing so, exaggerated the strengths of systematic review. We can put forward different reasons why this happened. Some [8] would see this as the influence of vested commercial interests but more likely in this case is that a big and wild claim was more likely to catch readers’ attention than a small and balanced one. I also think that reporting of anything that comes out of academic research is distorted by a desire to believe that there are simple solutions to complex problems when clearly there are not. So in one sense over-inflation of academic findings should be expected but what most disappointed me was the uniformity of the response. A head of steam was built up around the unqualified efficacy of antidepressants which was not the story in the original research.

Before moving on from this story, I became interested in the way that the press reports had been discussed in the online comments sections. The comments turned out to be civil and insightful, at least more so than I had predicted. There were blanket statements condemning pharmaceutical companies and accusations that the authors were part of a conspiracy to have us take drugs for private profit. However there was no shortage of people giving balanced and insightful accounts of their own experiences of antidepressants. In fact these experiences tended to be positive though writers were at pains to say this was their personal experience and they could not generalise for others. It was a case of the comments doing a better job than the reporting and I wonder whether this was because the politics of the issue did not follow predictable lines and this allowed a greater degree of openness.

References

[1] Cipriani A, Furukawa TA, Salanti G, et al. Comparative efficacy and acceptability of 21 antidepressant drugs for the acute treatment of adults with major depressive disorder: a systematic review and network meta-analysis The Lancet. Published online February 21 2018

[2] University of Oxford Antidepressants more effective in treating depression than placebo,

http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2018-02-22-antidepressants-more-effective-treating-depression-placebo

[3] Rice-Oxley, M. (2018) It’s official: antidepressants are not snake oil or a conspiracy – they work. Guardian [online] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/feb/21/its-official-antidepressants-are-not-snake-oil-or-a-conspiracy-they-work

The paper’s regular health correspondent (Sarah Bosely) concluded along the same lines that ‘The drugs do work: antidepressants are effective’. Guardian [online] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/21/the-drugs-do-work-antidepressants-are-effective-study-shows

What I found misleading here, and in other press reporting, was that commentary about the Cipriani et al paper was mixed up with a comments by other experts on the widely acknowledged lack of support for people with depression. The implication was that to be critical of the study was to condemn people to untreated depression.

[4] Smyth, C. (2018) More people should get pills to beat depression, Millions of sufferers would benefit, doctors told. Sunday Times [online]

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/more-people-should-get-pills-to-beat-depression-sv5vhczss

[5] Khan, S. (2018) Doctors should prescribe more antidepressants for people with mental health problems, study finds. Independent [online] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/antidepressants-prescribe-mental-health-problems-oxford-university-lancet-a8222371.html

[6] Pickles, K. (2018) Millions MORE of us should be taking antidepressants: Largest-ever study claims the pills DO work and GPs should be dishing them out. Mail [online]
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-5419967/Millions-taking-antidepressants.html#ixzz58mtfeilm

[[7] If you have a special interest then go to the NHS Choices Review of Evidence aimed at practitioners and the general public. They conclude from reading Cipriani et al that:

People are more likely to see their symptoms improve if they take an antidepressant than if they take a placebo. The researchers said the effects of the drugs were “mostly modest” and noted that antidepressants are just one of several evidence-based treatments for depression.

They also comment that Cognitive behavioural therapy, rather than antidepressants, remained the first-choice treatment for people with mild symptoms. This however was not a concern of the study itself.

NHS Choices (2018) Big new study confirms antidepressants work better than placebo [online] https://www.nhs.uk/news/medication/big-new-study-confirms-antidepressants-work-better-placebo/

[8] A full on critique of the research and its reporting was offered in particular by Dr Joanna Moncrieff who appeared on television and wrote to the papers offering her objections. To get a flavour go to the blog Mad in America below where she is interviewed by James Moore. [online]

https://www.madinamerica.com/2018/03/dr-joanna-moncrieff-challenging-new-hype-antidepressants/

It does not make the job very appealing

Posted on January 11, 2018 by Michael Hammond

Although my work focuses on education and technology, rather than party politics, the book I enjoyed reading the most last year was Harriet Harman’s biography [1], or more accurately her reflection on a career as a leading Labour politician in UK. The book is largely about being a woman in a man’s world. Harman was the first candidate to fight and win a by-election while pregnant and joined a House of Commons which was 97 per cent male. She went on to bring up three children while working all hours in Westminster and in her constituency.

Harman’s book is unusual in political memoirs as having a focus on women and the challenge of changing attitudes, not just by taking on the Conservative governments but also entrenched sexism in the Labour party. Although she achieved much in advancing women’s rights on a national stage, when just to be a committed constituency MP would have been an achievement in itself, what shines through is her vulnerability. In particular she was very firm in her feminist principles but acknowledged that she felt it much more difficult to stand up for herself than to stand up for others. She had to be persuaded to fight her constituency by-election in the first place and was worried in case her campaigns for more family friendly working hours in parliament might be seen as about her. Not surprisingly she needed encouragement to stand for leadership positions. The photo chosen for the book cover conveys this vulnerability well. It shows the young Labour candidate looking rather out of her depth, and this provides a sharp contrast to the conventional steely gaze on the dust jackets of most political biographies.

The book has been reviewed sympathetically. Interestingly these reviews have nearly always been written by women. McNicol [2] in particular provides a good description of the book and begins by saying that Harriet Harman ‘doesn’t make being a female MP sound very appealing’. In fact it does not make the job of an MP in general appealing and Harman was only ever able to go on and achieve what she did as she was part of a network of women who were determined to change the system. The surprise for me was that I had seen Harman as a rather inconsequential political figure, worthy but not very effective but I realized that I was reading this wrong. She was consistent and determined. She found the everyday sexism she encountered demoralising and at times it got through to her. She could have walked away. I had underestimated her leadership. She was offering a kind of servant leadership, though this is not a term she used herself. As a politician she put her ego backstage and tried to articulate the wishes of her network of women colleagues, it is a collective leadership though of course does not rule out standing up for your beliefs or making difficult decisions.

I was particularly interested in the early part of the book. She described her difficulties in fitting in at school (she went to a school which was academically very successful but was ‘carrying a smug sense of superiority’ quite out of tune with the changing times). She benefitted from the expansion of higher education in the 1960’s and went to York University where again she asked herself what she was doing there. In the reviews much is rightly made of a story she tells of a lecturer who, told her if she slept with him he’d make sure she got a 2.1. She turned him down and got a 2.1 anyway.

After university she found herself beginning legal training, encountering more sexism, and none of it making much sense. She started volunteering in her spare time in a legal rights centre in Brent, London. This was part of a network of centres offering legal advice and support for those who could not afford to pay for it. She found herself becoming involved with tenants associations, trade unions and radical lawyers. She felt at home and became committed to women’s rights and by extension to support for the Labour party. This led to working for the national Council for Civil Liberties, becoming deeply engaged with feminist politics.

Harman’s story of Labour in Parliament follows an arc that is well known to those following UK politics over the last 20 or 30 years. There was a right wing Prime Minister, Thatcher, opposed by a sectarian militancy that almost wrecked the Labour party. Next came the movement to make Labour more mainstream and electable. This was followed by three terms of successful labour government which only fell apart due to external events – the world financial crisis 2008 / 9. We now have had three conservative (led) governments and the unpicking of what Labour had achieved with the danger of left sectarianism re-emerging. There is a lot in this version of events but did Labour leaders like Harman end up losing the plot at least as far as their supporters were concerned? There are two events that stand out. The first was the Iraq war. Harman explains she supported the war on the grounds of there being weapons of mass destruction. She was wrong and the decision taken had tragic consequences for everybody concerned. Labour supporters and women became particularly critical of the decision, at least in its aftermath [3].

The second incident was local and purely symbolic. It was the decision she took as stand- in leader of the Labour party after the lost election of 2015 to have the party abstain on the conservative government’s welfare bill that included cuts to social security. To abstain on what was the first reading of a bill was not unusual and to vote against would have made no practical difference. However to Labour supporters it signalled that the party had lost focus in fighting the cause of the people they represented. Jeremy Corbyn was the only leadership contender that voted against the Bill and went on to win the Party leadership. It is difficult to comprehend why Harman had got this so wrong.

Harman’s book makes a timely contribution to the debate on gender and sexism, but I would recommend the book as much for its tone as for its content. She does that rare thing of showing modesty and humility at the same time as conviction and persistence. I would particularly recommend it to anyone not enjoying higher education or over committed to getting a ‘good degree’ as well. Looking at her account of volunteering in the Law Centre, she shows life will fall into place, you don’t need a first class degree to see it, just be alert enough to notice.

[1] Harman, H. (2017) A woman’s work London, Allen Lane.

[2] McNicol, J. (2017) The Angry Men, London Review of Books, 39, 24, 13-16

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n24/jean-mcnicol/the-angry-men

[3] Dahlgreen, W. (2015) Memories of Iraq: did we ever support the war?, You Gov https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/06/03/remembering-iraq/

[4] Wintour, P. (2015) Anger after Harriet Harman says Labour will not vote against welfare bill, The Guardian, 12 July 2015

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/12/harman-labour-not-vote-against-welfare-bill-limit-child-tax-credits

Michael Hammond

education and social research matters

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