The Dictionary of Human Geography (165 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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questionnaire
An instrument for collecting data for survey ANALysis. Every respondent is asked the same questions, in the same way and in the same sequence. This differs from the more open ended, conversational format of interviews and other quaLiTaTive MeThods. Questionnaires can be used to collect informa tion to classify respondents (e.g. gender, income or age), to learn about their behaviour (e.g. voting practices, number of hours of television viewing per week or recycling behav iour) and to understand their attitudes. Questionnaires may be administered face to face, over the phone or via the internet, or they can be mailed and self administered. There are advantages and disadvantages to each mode of administering questionnaires, including cost, response rate, accuracy of re sponses and the level of detail that can be obtained. One mode of delivery is not superior to another: the advantages and disadvantages are weighed in relation to the research question. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Because one of the strengths of survey re search is the capacity to establish patterns over large populations, questionnaires must be very carefully designed so as to be unambiguous to a large number of people. They must be un biased and simply understood, with clear in structions of how to respond. There are standard pitfalls to avoid, such as the inclusion of double negatives and double barrelled questions. Nevertheless, there is no avoiding the fact that questions are inevitably framed from a certain perspective and, in the case of face to face or telephone interviews, the pres ence of an interviewer will have effects that can only be understood rather than removed (see interviews and interviewing). A variety of types of questions can be asked, including open ended ones. Closed ended questions standardize responses across a given set of responses and are already structured for stat istical analysis. Open ended questions require coding before statistical analysis, but are suit able if the full range of possible responses is unknown, or the topic is a sensitive or complex one that requires some explanation or qualifi cation. Because questionnaire design is so dif ficult and so important, focus groups can be used to understand interpretations of particu lar questions and questionnaires are always pre tested. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Questionnaires are considered by some to be best suited for discovering patterns and less helpful for studying causal relationships. Marsh (1982) assesses these criticisms and provides a careful guide for questionnaire de sign so as to enhance the utility of question naires for statistical causal analysis. This involves collecting data on many different vari ables, beyond ones identified as independent (causal) and dependent (effect) variables, in cluding possible confounding, antecedent and intervening variables. She also provides guide lines for asking people about their reasons for doing things. This ?reasons analysis? involves asking a series of questions that break the rea soning process down in such a way as to assist the respondent in explaining their reasons. Concerns are also expressed about the accur acy and truthfulness of survey research, and it is as well to remember that some character istics of the survey context promote truthful ness so as to emphasize these features. These (NEW PARAGRAPH) include underlining to the respondent the fact that their completion of the questionnaire is entirely voluntary, and that their responses are a valuable contribution to understanding an important research question. gp (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Babbie (2001); Parfitt (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
race
A historical means of social clas sification and differentiation that attempts to essentialize political and cultural differences by linking physical traits (i.e. skin, blood, genes) and social practices (i.e. religion, vio lence, passion) to innate, immutable charac teristics (see essentialism). Race as a concept presumes that characteristics (tendencies, behaviours, dispositions, interests) of an indi vidual can be projected to understandings of essential traits of a population or that the pre sumed traits of a population can be discerned through the characteristics of an individual. Though these assumptions have been widely and exhaustively disproven, they still operate as ?common sense? in society with powerful and violent effects. As such, race is a social construction but racism is a material fact. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The contemporary meaning of ?race? has roots in older forms of hierarchy and classifi cation, but its contemporary form as an innate physiological or genetic means of differentiat ing individuals and populations is largely the product of eighteenth century social relationships associated with the European enlightenment and colonialism (see also europe). Most scholars agree that earlier forms of social differentiation and hierarchy were different from modern ideas of race. In the ancient world, for example, the Greeks distinguished between the ?civilized? and ?bar barous?, the Romans between freedom and slavery, and the Christians between the savage and the saved. But in all these cases difference was not fixed: barbarians could become ?civil ized? in Greek cities, Roman slaves were not determined by inherited traits, and Christians were offered the possibility of salvation through conversion. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The most powerful antecedents to the con temporary notion of race can be found in the Christian notion of the Great Chain of Being, which depicted a hierarchy in the order of things as immutably fixed by God, and the idea of succession to kingship or royalty based on a line of descent (or bloodline). These notions provided the basis for identifying populations through a fixed and defining fea ture such as blood. In the fifteenth century, for example, it was deemed impossible for Jews to convert to Christianity by virtue of their blood, a doctrine that helped to define the notion of a Jewish population that was supposedly distinctive and unassimilable through its shared immutable qualities. Similar appeals to a naturalized hierarchy were made in the sixteenth century debates between Bartolome de Las Casas and Juan Gines de Sepulveda, concerning the treatment of the indigenous inhabitants of the Spanish colonies in South America as either child like human beings (who could thus be converted to Christianity) or ?savages? (whose exploitation could be justified through their lower position in the natural order of things). The Spanish Empire developed a doctrine of ?blood purity? (limpeza de sangre) that allowed and even required the differential treatment of those who could not be converted because of the supposed impurity of their blood, and the subsequent hierarchical classification by blood provided an influential precedent for modern formations of race (Darder and Torres, 2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The term ?race? came into English usage in the seventeenth century and here too it was most forcefully articulated through Anglo American projects of colonization in the New World. In developing a concept of civil ization that was supposedly coterminous with the west, particularly in the eighteenth century, Europeans and Americans fabri cated cultural and behavioral (?racial?) traits that legitimized their own superiority and exploitative colonial practices. But these ascriptions were more than the product of an expansive, exploitative and European pro ject of modernity, and scholars such as Ann Stoler (1995) and Paul Gilroy (2000a) have sought to show that ?race? is constitutive of modernity itself. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The modern notion of ?race? thus has a complex genealogy, but it has been most forcefully advanced through the claim that it is a demonstrably scientific concept. As such, ?race? is inseparable from the development of so called ?natural history? in general and the work of the Swedish scholar Carolus Linnaeus (1707 71) in particular. Linnaeus is usually regarded as the founder of modern scientific systems of classification. He divided human beings into four taxonomic sub orders, whose (NEW PARAGRAPH) distinctive traits he directly linked to skin colour. Thus the Europeaeus was supposedly white, gentle, sanguine, inventive and ruled by law, while Africanus was black, crafty, negligent and governed by caprice. In devel oping this taxonomy, Linneaus effectively subsumed cultural formations within the taxonomical order of nature. In 1745, the French naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon (1707 88) explicitly introduced the term ?race? into natural history and, develop ing Linnaeus' categories, divided human beings into separate ?races?. Although Buffon acknowledged the artificiality of these divi sions, they were subsequently reified by the German anthropologist and physiologist Johnann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752 1840), who developed a classification of five human types based on cranial skull measurements: this system served as the ?sci entific' basis for racial classification for almost 200 years and even though it has been widely repudiated, it is still present in popular culture today. (NEW PARAGRAPH) But it was through darwinism and populist simplifications of Darwin?s ideas of ?natural selection' and ?survival of the fittest' that the most pernicious formations of ?race? were nat uralized. Most notable was Francis Galton (1822 1911), Darwin?s half cousin, who applied a version of Darwinian theories to human society and in 1883 developed the concept of Eugenics (?good genes?) to encour age socially engineered heredity as a means of improving the human race. In the USA, the Eugenics movement found an appreciative audience in the context of increasing immi gration, poverty and violent labour politics, where it seemed to offer a means not only of social improvement but also of social control. The initial focus was on ?positive eugenics' through birth control, selective breeding and eventually genetic engineering to assure ?bet ter babies?; but a ?negative eugenics? was sub sequently developed, which advocated forced sterilization and segregation to preserve the purity of the white race. These concepts reached their hideous climax in Nazi Germany under the banner of ?racial hygiene', when ?Aryan' women were impreg nated by SS officers, hundreds of thousands of people who were declared unfit were s terilized, and millions more ?undesirables', primarily Jews but also gypsies and homosex uals, were murdered to protect the ?purity' of the Aryan race (see hoLocaust). Here, modern biological racism was taken to its ?logical' end, in which some presumed innate behavioral qualities and social status could only be addressed through the extermination of the biology of individuals who were con sidered the sources of the problem (Larson, 1995: cf. biopolitics). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Even after the widespread postwar repudi ation of Nazi race science and Eugenics, the claim that there is an innate scientific basis to ?race', fusing physiological features to social behaviours, is still a common means of social classification, and continues to be a powerful strategy of dividing, ranking and controlling people around the world. Newer efforts from sociobiology, neo Darwinism, evolutionary psychology, some strains of evolutionary anthropology and biology as well as some versions of genetics continue to search for a physical basis for ?racial' difference, while state sponsored systems of racial profiling assume that such a basis has been found and can be deployed as an effective weapon against crime or terrorism. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The problem with the debates around race, as W.E.B. Du Bois pointed out over a century ago when he abandoned his efforts to show its erroneous foundation, is that the very idea of race has been so comprehensively woven into the social and psychological fabric of society that simply revealing the fallaciousness of racial classification does little to expunge the term or diminish its extraordinary power. He wrote that ?in the fight against race prejudice, we were not facing simply the rational con scious determination of white folk to oppress us; we were facing age long complexes sunk now largely to unconscious habit and irratio nal urge? (Du Bois, 1986 [1940], p. 296). This realization that constructs of ?race? are embed ded within the formation of modern human subjectivity was developed by Frantz Fanon (1925 61) who, in Black skin, white masks in particular, emphasized how ?race' is impli cated in both how one comes to know and define a self and how that self is articulated and transformed as it acts and is acted upon in the world (Fanon, 1967 [1952]). These and other critiques prompted a shift towards an analysis of how ?race' comes into being though law, popular culture and everyday practices of racial formation (see also post coLoniaLism). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The critique of race based cultural forma tions has been reinforced by parallel debates within and, indeed, about the very ?nature' of science. Most famously, Richard Lewontin and Stephen J. Gould challenged the bio logical and genetic basis of racial identifica tion, arguing that there is more genetic variation within a nominally ?racial? group than between such groups. However, these and other scholars effectively placed nature outside the field of culture and politics, argu ing either that ?race? was cultural and not nat ural or that genetic maps could not be projected on to cultural behaviours (Haraway, 1989). As such, the debate often became polarized between nature and nurture: Was race a biological category or a cultural one? Science was assumed to have the authority to speak for nature and, as a result, the cultural politics of the supposed ?science of race? was left largely unchallenged. More recent scholar ship in science and technology studies by Donna Haraway (1989), Nancy Stepan Leyes (1990 [1986]) and Ian Hacking (1999) has help move away from the nature culture dual ism that underwrote these discussions, and has shown that nature and the voices that speak for and about race and the science of race are always already bound up in politics. (NEW PARAGRAPH) These approaches to understanding race have been echoed in contemporary black cul tural studies, Chicano studies, ethnic studies and critical race theory, which have approached racial difference and affinities as constructed through social struggles, shared histories and everyday practices positioning racialized subjects and their formation within multiple relations of power. Rather than fixed difference, ?race? is understood as a contingent formation unevenly produced in different times and places with no invariant meaning or universal form (see, e.g., Hesse, 2000; Fregoso, 2003; Moore, Kosek and Pandian, 2003). As such, many scholars of difference have abandoned the term ?race? altogether, moving ?beyond race? to address the multiple forms and particularities of social relations, and denying any overarching integrity or coherence to race as an analytical concept while still being attentive to the ways in which racism(s) are a lived daily reality. jk (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Essed and Goldberg (2002); Gilroy (2000); Miles and Brown (2003). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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