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Todd Gitlin
Professor Journalism and Sociology
Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University
"On getting people to tell you more than they want to"
Abstract: There is a naive assumption that respondents in social research want to tell the truth as they best see it. But of course they have other motives as well: to present themselves as respectable; to protect their honor. I will draw on my experience interviewing (a) journalists and (b) television entertainment decision-makers to explore some of the pitfalls of excessive gullibility in particular. And I will reflect upon the ethical dilemmas entailed.
About the Series: Stanford is inaugurating an inter-disciplinary workshop for qualitative social scientific research with a series of talks by distinguished scholars. The workshop's purpose is to showcase qualitative research of interest to a broad social science audience and to bring together Stanford social science faculty who employ qualitative methods in their own work. With the lecture series, we seek to present premier scholars whose work both constitutes major substantive and methodological contributions to their own fields and speaks to the interests of scholars across the social science disciplines.
Upcoming Events:
Dr. Sherry Ortner, Columbia University "Elements of Serious Games"
January 25 at 3:30 p.m.
Dr. Michael Burawoy, UC Berkeley "Global Ethnography: Comparative or Relational"
April 5 at 3:30 p.m.
The workshop series is supported by Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS), the Methods of Analysis Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS,) and Karen Cook, the cognizant dean for the social sciences.