In the previous three installments, we briefly touched on questionnaires , focus groups , and the Delphi method . In the third article, I mentioned that it was a triptych, meaning that these three techniques (but I could have chosen others) cover a certain number of the types of tools and procedures we typically use in social research: standard (or quantitative) research with the questionnaire, and non-standard (qualitative) research with the other two. The latter, from the " group techniques " family, are the first, a real group technique (meaning: people can interact freely) and the second, a nominal group technique (meaning: people cannot interact freely; in fact, in the Delphi they don't interact at all).
The classification of techniques
If we add the interview (called hermeneutic or biographical), which is a non-standard, non-group technique, we'd have completed the picture. More or less all the other techniques you can think of are either standard or non-standard; in the latter case, they are group-based or not, and if they are group-based, they can be real or nominal. In reality, I'm simplifying, as always, but not by much. We must now ask ourselves whether, beyond the myriad operational proposals of the supermarket of techniques (a vast emporium that thrives largely on marketing and patents, often of very little importance), there are common foundations among these techniques, simple, basic elements from which the techniques are constructed, just as everything in the universe is made of atoms, and the latter of neutrons and protons, and the latter of quarks (I'm not a physicist, so I'll stop here, though I know it's all more complex). Is there a social research quark? What are the techniques made of? Let's think about it together.
The “matter” of techniques
The questionnaire is made up of questions, scales, and other useful objects to solicit an opinion, description, or statement from our interviewee. The focus group is a discussion format between individuals who debate, interact, and even argue, while the Delphi is a remote, written interaction between experts and the evaluator. You can clearly see that there is a common element: password, discourse, the production of assertions. The quark of social research is therefore the word, as expressed by our interlocutors (if you're not already a devoted reader of this column, I'd say now is the time to reread the second installment: Data information techniques and format and, if anything, the third one to follow: Numbers are a language). Absolutely all social research techniques and tools are based exclusively on what others tell us. Their statements, recorded differently depending on the different procedures, are all we have.
Language as a method
Of course, don't be fooled by second-level data , indicators , or " numbers ." Even those have underlying collection procedures that involve words, asking for something, perhaps preliminarily establishing conventions, rounding methods, validity, and so on. The real problems lie elsewhere: how do we adequately record speech, knowing that it is imprecise, that it can lie, that it is always subject to a necessary interpretation ? How, then, do we choose which technique is best suited to adequately capture the discourse, from a perspective that is not simply communicative but technical, requiring precision? If you've been following this column, you'll have already noticed a certain emphasis on language. Language is truly something important that cannot remain in the background, and starting with the next episode, we should look at it as a method. "Language as a method" means having a linguistic theory capable of guiding our operational procedures; It means understanding the method as a form of language and the techniques as tools that operate at the linguistic level and must be constructed with specific linguistic considerations. We will have many episodes to discuss this.
Claudio Bezzi
