5.2 Ethical and critical considerations

So far, we have talked about knowledge as it exists in the world, but what about the process of research itself? Doesn’t the researcher bring their own biases, perspectives, and experiences to the process? The critique of science as an enterprise dominated by the perspectives of white men from North America and Europe is one that has had a profound impact on how we view knowledge. Because scientists design research studies, create measures, and interpret results, there is always the risk that a scientist’s objectivity slips and as a result, biases are expressed.

Consider this example from professional sports. The National Football League (NFL) has long downplayed the lifelong impact of concussions and traumatic brain injury. However, due to the racist science that existed when the issue was first addressed through a settlement in the 1990s, Black players were assumed to have lower cognitive function and were thus any losses in cognitive function were less significant, resulting in a lower payout or additional barriers to an eventual payout (Dale, 2021).^[1] It is hard to view this “race-norming” without taking into account the impact of the Bell Curve, a racist and methodologically flawed book that purported to support white intellectual superiority (Bell, 1995).^[2] According to an Associated Press report:

The NFL noted that the norms were developed in medicine “to stop bias in testing, not perpetrate it”…The binary race norms, when they are used in the testing, assumes that Black patients start with worse cognitive function than whites and other non-Blacks. That makes it harder for them to show a deficit and qualify for an award. [Two players], for instance, were denied awards but would have qualified had they been white, according to their lawsuit (Dale, 2021, para 10-13).

Part of the value in making the philosophical assumptions of your project explicit is that you can scan for sources of explicit or implicit bias you bring to the research process.

Whose truth does science establish?

Social work is concerned with the “isms” of oppression (ableism, ageism, cissexism, classism, heterosexism, racism, sexism, etc.), and so our approach to science must reconcile its history as both a tool of oppression and its exclusion of oppressed groups. Science grew out of the Enlightenment, a philosophical movement which applied reason and empirical analysis to understanding the world. While the Enlightenment brought forth tremendous achievements, the critiques of Marxian, feminist, and other critical theorists complicated the Enlightenment understanding of science. For this section, I will focus on feminist critiques of science, building upon an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Crasnow, 2020).^[3]

In its original formulation, science was an individualistic endeavor. As we learned in Chapter 1, a basic statement of the scientific method is that a researcher studies existing theories on a topic, formulates a hypothesis about what might be true, and either confirms or disconfirms their hypothesis through experiment and rigorous observation. Over time, our theories become more accurate in their predictions and more comprehensive in their conclusions. Scientists put aside their preconceptions, look at the data, and build their theories based on objective rationality.

Yet, this cannot be perfectly true. Scientists are human, after all. As a profession historically dominated by white men, scientists have dismissed women and other people from marginalized groups as being psychologically unfit for the scientific profession. While attitudes have improved, science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) and related fields remain dominated by white men (Grogan, 2019).^[4] Biases can persist in social work theory and research when social scientists do not have similar experiences to the populations they study.

Gender bias can influence the research questions scientists choose to answer. Feminist critiques of medical science drew attention to women’s health issues, spurring research and changing standards of care. The focus on domestic violence in the empirical literature can also be seen as a result of feminist critique. Thus, critical theory helps us critique what is on the agenda for science. If science is to answer important questions, it must speak to the concerns of all people. Through the democratization in access to scientific knowledge and the means to produce it, science becomes a sister process of social development and social justice.

The goal of a diverse and participatory scientific community lies in contrast to much of what we understand to be “proper” scientific knowledge. Many of the older, classic social science theories were developed based on research which observed males or from university students in the United States or other Western nations. How these observations were made, what questions were asked, and how the data were interpreted were shaped by the same oppressive forces that existed in broader society, a process that continues into the present. In psychology, the concept of hysteria or hysterical women was believed to be caused by a wandering womb (Tasca et al., 2012).^[5] Even today, there are gender biases in diagnoses of histrionic personality disorder and racial biases in psychotic disorders (Klonsky et al., 2002)^[6] because the theories underlying them were created in a sexist and racist culture. In these ways, science can reinforce the truth of the white Western male perspective.

Finally, it is important to note that social science research is often conducted on populations rather than with populations. Historically, this has often meant Western men traveling to other countries and seeking to understand other cultures through a Western lens. Lacking cultural humility and failing to engage stakeholders, ethnocentric research of this sort has led to the view of non-Western cultures as inferior. Moreover, the use of these populations as research subjects rather than co-equal participants in the research process privileges the researcher’s knowledge over that from other groups or cultures. Researchers working with indigenous cultures, in particular, had a destructive habit of conducting research for a short time and then leaving, without regard for the impact their study had on the population. These critiques of Western science aim to decolonize social science and dismantle the racist ideas that oppress indigenous and non-Western peoples through research (Smith, 2013).^[7]

The central concept in feminist, anti-racist, and decolonization critiques (among other critical frames) is epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice happens when someone is treated unfairly in their capacity to know something or describe their experience of the world. As described by Fricker (2011),^[8] the injustice emerges from the dismissal of knowledge from oppressed groups, discrimination against oppressed groups in scientific communities, and the resulting gap between what scientists can make sense of from their experience and the experiences of people with less power who have lived experience of the topic. We recommend this video from Edinburgh Law School which applies epistemic injustice to studying public health emergencies, disabilities, and refugee services.

Self-determination and free will

When scientists observe social phenomena, they often take the perspective of determinism, meaning that what is seen is the result of processes that occurred earlier in time (i.e., cause and effect). As you will see in Chapter 9, this process is represented in the classical formulation of a research question which asks “what is the relationship between X (cause) and Y (effect)?” By framing a research question in such a way, the scientist is disregarding any reciprocal influence that Y has on X. Moreover, the scientist also excludes human agency from the equation. It is simply that a cause will necessitate an effect. For example, a researcher might find that few people living in neighborhoods with higher rates of poverty graduate from high school, and thus conclude that poverty causes adolescents to drop out of school. This conclusion, however, does not address the story behind the numbers. Each person who is counted as graduating or dropping out has a unique story of why they made the choices they did. Perhaps they had a mentor or parent that helped them succeed. Perhaps they faced the choice between employment to support family members or continuing in school.

For this reason, determinism is critiqued as reductionistic in the social sciences because people have agency over their actions. This is unlike the natural sciences like physics. While a table isn’t aware of the friction it has with the floor, parents and children are likely aware of the friction in their relationships and act based on how they interpret that conflict. The opposite of determinism is free will, that humans can choose how they act and their behavior and thoughts are not solely determined by what happened prior in a neat, cause-and-effect relationship. Researchers adopting a perspective of free will view the process of, continuing with our education example, seeking higher education as the result of a number of mutually influencing forces and the spontaneous and implicit processes of human thought. For these researchers, the picture painted by determinism is too simplistic.

A similar dichotomy can be found in the debate between individualism and holism. When you hear something like “the disease model of addiction leads to policies that pathologize and oppress people who use drugs,” the speaker is making a methodologically holistic argument. They are making a claim that abstract social forces (the disease model, policies) can cause things to change. A methodological individualist would critique this argument by saying that the disease model of addiction doesn’t actually cause anything by itself. From this perspective, it is the individuals, rather than any abstract social force, who oppress people who use drugs. The disease model itself doesn’t cause anything to change; the individuals who follow the precepts of the disease model are the agents who actually oppress people in reality. To an individualist, all social phenomena are the result of individual human action and agency. To a holist, social forces can determine outcomes for individuals without individuals playing a causal role, undercutting free will and research projects that seek to maximize human agency.

Radical change

Another assumption scientists make is around the nature of the social world. Is it an orderly place that remains relatively stable over time? Or is it a place of constant change and conflict? The view of the social world as an orderly place can help a researcher describe how things fit together to create a cohesive whole. For example, systems theory can help you understand how different systems interact with and influence one another, drawing energy from one place to another through an interconnected network with a tendency towards homeostasis. This is a more consensus-focused and status-quo-oriented perspective. Yet, this view of the social world cannot adequately explain the radical shifts and revolutions that occur. It also leaves little room for human action and free will. In this more radical space, change consists of the fundamental assumptions about how the social world works.

For example, at the time of this writing, protests are taking place across the world to remember the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and other victims of police violence and systematic racism. Public support of Black Lives Matter, an anti-racist activist group that focuses on police violence and criminal justice reform, has experienced a radical shift in public support in just two weeks since the killing, equivalent to the previous 21 months of advocacy and social movement organizing (Cohn & Quealy, 2020).^[9] Abolition of police and prisons, once a fringe idea, has moved into the conversation about remaking the criminal justice system from the ground-up, centering its historic and current role as an oppressive system for Black Americans. Seemingly overnight, reducing the money spent on police and giving that money to social services became a moderate political position.

A researcher centering change may choose to understand this transformation or even incorporate radical anti-racist ideas into the design and methods of their study. For an example of how to do so, see this participatory action research study working with Black and Latino youth (Bautista et al., 2013).^[10] Contrastingly, a researcher centering consensus and the status quo might focus on incremental changes what people currently think about the topic. For example, see this survey of social work student attitudes on poverty and race that seeks to understand the status quo of student attitudes and suggest small changes that might change things for the better (Constance-Huggins et al., 2020).^[11] To be clear, both studies contribute to racial justice. However, you can see by examining the methods section of each article how the participatory action research article addresses power and values as a core part of their research design, qualitative ethnography and deep observation over many years, in ways that privilege the voice of people with the least power. In this way, it seeks to rectify the epistemic injustice of excluding and oversimplifying Black and Latino youth. Contrast this more radical approach with the more traditional approach taken in the second article, in which they measured student attitudes using a survey developed by researchers.

Axiology: Assumptions about values

Axiology is the study of values and value judgements (literally “rational discourse about values [a​ xía​]”). In philosophy this field is subdivided into ethics (the study of morality) and aesthetics (the study of beauty, taste and judgement). For the hard-nosed scientist, the relevance of axiology might not be obvious. After all, what difference do one’s feelings make for the data collected? Don’t we spend a long time trying to teach researchers to be objective and remove their values from the scientific method?

Like ontology and epistemology, the import of axiology is typically built into research projects and exists “below the surface”. You might not consciously engage with values in a research project, but they are still there. Similarly, you might not hear many researchers refer to their axiological commitments but they might well talk about their values and ethics, their positionality, or a commitment to social justice.

Our values focus and motivate our research. These values could include a commitment to scientific rigor, or to always act ethically as a researcher. At a more general level we might ask: What matters? Why do research at all? How does it contribute to human wellbeing? Almost all research projects are grounded in trying to answer a question that matters or has consequences. Some research projects are even explicit in their intention to improve things rather than observe them. This is most closely associated with “critical” approaches.

Critical and radical views of science focus on how to spread knowledge and information in a way that combats oppression. These questions are central for creating research projects that fight against the objective structures of oppression—like unequal pay—and their subjective counterparts in the mind—like internalized sexism. For example, a more critical research project would fight not only against statutes of limitations for sexual assault but on how women have internalized rape culture as well. Its explicit goal would be to fight oppression and to inform practice on women’s liberation. For this reason, creating change is baked into the research questions and methods used in more critical and radical research projects.

As part of studying radical change and oppression, we are likely employing a model of science that puts values front-and-center within a research project. All social work research is values-driven, as we are a values-driven profession. Historically, though, most social scientists have argued for values-free science. Scientists agree that science helps human progress, but they hold that researchers should remain as objective as possible—which means putting aside politics and personal values that might bias their results, similar to the cognitive biases we discussed in section 1.1. Over the course of last century, this perspective was challenged by scientists who approached research from an explicitly political and values-driven perspective. As we discussed earlier in this section, feminist critiques strive to understand how sexism biases research questions, samples, measures, and conclusions, while decolonization critiques try to de-center the Western perspective of science and truth.

Linking axiology, epistemology, and ontology

It is important to note that both values-central and values-neutral perspectives are useful in furthering social justice. Values-neutral science is helpful at predicting phenomena. Indeed, it matches well with objectivist ontologies and epistemologies. Let’s examine a measure of depression, the Patient Health Questionnaire (PSQ-9). Its authors spent years creating a measure that accurately and reliably measures the concept of depression. It is assumed to measure depression in any person, and scales like this are often translated into other languages (and subsequently validated) for more widespread use . The goal is to measure depression in a valid and reliable manner. We can use this objective measure to predict relationships with other risk and protective factors, such as substance use or poverty, as well as evaluate the impact of evidence-based treatments for depression like narrative therapy.

While measures like the PSQ-9 help with prediction, they do not allow you to understand an individual person’s experience of depression. To do so, you need to listen to their stories and how they make sense of the world. The goal of understanding isn’t to predict what will happen next, but to empathically connect with the person and truly understand what’s happening from their perspective. Understanding fits best in subjectivist epistemologies and ontologies, as they allow for multiple truths (i.e. that multiple interpretations of the same situation are valid). Although all researchers addressing depression are working towards socially just ends, the values commitments researchers make as part of the research process influence them to adopt objective or subjective ontologies and epistemologies.

Philosophical assumptions, as a whole

As you engage with theoretical and empirical information in social work, keep these philosophical assumptions in mind. They are useful shortcuts to understanding the deeper ideas and assumptions behind the construction of knowledge. See Table 5.1 below for a short reference list of the key assumptions we covered in sections 5.1 and 5.2. The purpose of exploring these philosophical assumptions isn’t to find out which is true and which is false. Instead, the goal is to identify the assumptions that fit with how you think about your working question and your personal worldview.