On Objectivity
I Thought Science was a Safe Place
I was trained as a social scientist ( I have a Ph.D. in Sociology, and started my career as a Professor of Criminology) and always considered myself a scientist. I’m logical, practical, and not very emotional. So the idea of objectivity in social and evaluation research made sense to me. I accepted it without too much thought. You can’t bias the results, need to collect the data using your analytical skills and self, and present the findings without you being in there anywhere. Or else they won’t be accepted. And all that work was for nothing.
The Campbell Effect describes a phenomenon where the act of collecting the data changes the result. So by asking you how many cigarettes you smoke a day, I might make you think about your smoking, and that might lead to you cutting back. (If only it were that easy, but you get the idea).
My job was to collect information about people in the worst situations in their lives, and report that information so outsiders will believe it. I was supposed to say what’s “true”, and correct. I was asked with being completely objective or losing my credibility and risking the credibility of the organizations and people I worked with.
So that’s what I did. I tried not to influence anything too much, to keep everything at arm’s length, to not get too close to staff or participants in a program, to keep my opinions to myself. I used valid and reliable surveys designed for the appropriate population, and made sure everyone was entering the right data in the right way into the right database. To crunch the data and write the report and use the language that tells everyone that there has been no undue influence.
But Was It?
But I was influenced. All the time.
A good friend of mine worked at a rape crisis center. This had been her job years before I met her, when by then we were both evaluators and social scientists. She told me about one of the clients that she worked with at the center. It was an old woman, who had been working in her garden in the front of her house one day. A car pulled up and a group of men grabbed her and dragged her into the car, and raped her.
I can’t remember why my friend told me this story, I don’t remember the context, other than I think we were talking about how appalling humans can be (that’s a conversation I’ve had more times than I can count). I didn’t think more about it at the time, but after that, when I was working on my garden in front of my Baltimore rowhome, it was in my mind. I can’t say I was afraid it would happen to me, but I just went about the world with an awareness that this was a thing that could happen to you. It would never leave me, that awareness, every time I was in the front yard with my back to the street.
Can We, Should We, be Objective?
As scientists, researchers, evaluators, and “objective” observers, these things we hear stay with us. It didn’t happen to me. I didn’t even meet the person it happened to. I talked to a person working in an agency, third hand (or is that fourth hand)? But it changed me in a small way.
And that wasn’t even a project I was working on. Understanding the context and the culture of a project is key to understanding implementation. And the things I heard helped me to understand why the data might look the way it did. Or that was how I talked about it.
But to think that you can hear the stories of the people working in the agencies, and the people they work with, especially when you are doing interviews and focus groups, and think that you will not be impacted by it, is crazy.
Objectivity Should Not Be the Goal
It’s one thing to maintain your objectivity in a chemistry lab or a pharmaceutical company. Maintaining your objectivity in a community school or an infant mortality initiative is a challenge to your humanity.
Hearing the things I heard, even third- and fourth-hand, and treating them like data and context changed me. I developed an aloofness, thinking of this information as relevant context, I didn’t allow myself to feel the impact of what I was hearing.
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Because I couldn’t garden in my front yard without the creeping awareness of the street behind me, I didn’t want to think too much about the stories I heard, except when I could use them to interpret findings. Because I couldn’t continue the work if I let what I heard sink in, because I would carry that around with me in a way that was too heavy.
The Cost of Objectivity
But it cost me. It created a self-imposed distance between me and the world. My objectivity didn’t just keep me apart from the people in those stories, or the people telling me those stories, it created a walled-off existence that got heavier and heavier year after year.
I experienced a tension between being objective and processing and feeling what I’m hearing from people in the context of doing this work. As a business owner, I felt compelled to continue to bathe in the glow of objectivity while personally looking over my shoulder. Someone who worked for me years ago told me she would come home at night after accompanying home visitors to pregnant Mothers and sit on her couch and cry at what she saw. It made sense, anyone would, but I didn’t think about that for myself because I had a business to run, and reports to write. How would I keep bringing in work and writing up findings if I sat down with what I was hearing and feeling?
I couldn’t. I couldn’t keep making my living, and think too much or feel too much about what was going on in the space where I was collecting data. So I didn’t. And it cost me. It cost me more than I realized. I started to feel like a robot, not only at work but everywhere in my life. I eventually realized I couldn’t do the work anymore, but I didn’t realize why. I just thought I was burned out.
People Aren’t the Worst Part, They are the Best…and the Worst
In some ways, the best moments of my career were lacking in objectivity. I said that one of my favorite projects was an ethnographic, qualitative project where my job was to tell the story (yes, it was research, but it always felt like my job was to tell their story) of an advocacy initiative that used a human rights framework to get a living wage and fair working conditions for folks who were the most disadvantaged in the workforce. Undocumented and new immigrants, recovering (and not yet recovered) drug addicts, people just out of prison, these people did tough work and the initiative was designed to mobilize them. To bring together people no one thought twice about to march in the streets, to hunger strike, and to make the people who benefited from their labor (sports fans, as it were) aware that they deserve to be paid for their work.
And because of the nature of the project, I wasn’t just interviewing people I was interviewing people while giving them a ride home, or talking to them on the way to a retreat, informal conversations. One time I was asked to translate for a group of workers from El Salvador because the Latino co-ordinator hadn’t arrived. I only speak intermediate Spanish, but I remember looking around and thinking “It’s me or nothing”, so I translated the meeting for them, and told the organizers what they wanted to say, the best I could.
I was not objective. I felt strongly about their mission, I cared about the people I spoke with, who were honest with me about everything from their current life circumstances to the man who told me in incredible and awful detail about what he went through to get to the United States to do this work that I would never consider doing.
But it was one of the only times I felt like my whole self was present in my work. Because I cared.
Do we ever have objectivity? Should we? What does it do to us as whole beings to pretend not to see? To be determined not to be influenced by what is going on in the context where we are doing the work?
I spent many years doing evaluation work in community schools, and in-depth work in one school in my own community. There was lead in the drinking fountains and rats in the school kitchen. The drug task force had taken up shop in the front of the school, fully armed, while kids were in their midst. This was at a school where the father of one of the students had been shot in the street the year before. And then other kids in the neighborhood came out and picked the pockets before the body was cold.
I don’t want to not know what I heard during that work, that a parent was making her children have sex with each other to get food. Knowing these things, I’m in that school, asking these kids to sit down and fill out surveys and check a box about whether they feel safe at school and at home. How could they? And if they did feel safe what kind of crazy and delusional would they be?
Because of course they don’t feel safe. And that’s not the fault of the people who run the program trying to hold together all the things, the abuse, the constant exposure to violence, and teachers who scream at them because they are also constantly exposed to violence. Reading tutors can’t fix that. Art classes can’t either. But they need those things, too. And I can’t stop being mad at the funder who cornered me in an elevator and asked me why we weren’t seeing better test scores after two years of providing services to those kids. Test scores.
Dare to Bring Your Whole Self to your Work
Like the woman in the garden, there are other stories that stick with me. They haunt me. But they didn’t happen to me, or even near me. I can’t stop thinking, when your 12-year-old brother hits your little sister in the head, knocking her out, and then rapes her in front of you, you would be wise to never feel safe in that house again, and it would be understandable if you never felt safe in the world after that. And if just hearing about that kid broke my heart in a way that I think about twenty years later, what does it do to the people who hear those stories every day?
I never felt like I could talk about the emotional impact of those stories. Reading case files was the worst. If I brought it up, I wouldn’t seem objective. So I internalized it. I told myself it didn’t matter, it was just “data”. I did what cops do, I joked about it in a “man this is a messed up place” kind of way.
A good friend of mine who is a social worker would call me up with a crazy story, and he’d always end by saying “ya’ gotta laugh, right?”. And he meant so you wouldn’t cry, of course. But you gotta cry, too. Or else it will eat you up.
