The Frankfurt School’s empirical method required trusted local interviewers rather than outside field workers
Evidence
Sherman’s interest grew when Pollock told him during a meeting
that we would not be interested in a purely statistical survey or a kind of super-poll, but only in a study using the quantitative and qualitative methods developed in our West Coast laboratory under Horkheimer's direction'.Sherman seemed to have been very much impressed by our insisting that the work of interviewing must be done by people who know the interviewees and whom the interviewees trust and not by field workers unknown to them. The functions of our two or three field workers would be to organize and instruct the interviewers on the strength of contacts made available by the Jewish Labor Committee and other Labor groups.’ — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1555
Categorization
- DEFINE: Articulates the Institute’s distinctive qualitative-quantitative empirical methodology: interviews conducted by trusted community insiders, organized by a small supervisory staff.
- ADDENDUM: This methodologically distinctive approach to interviewing — trusted local interviewers rather than anonymous field workers — parallels the trust/reputation themes in the reader’s knowledge-base work on institutional trust.
- XREF: connects to: Field researchers studying the unemployed must embed themselves usefully in local life — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 680; The researchers coded interview data flexibly to maximize prejudice discrimination — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 509
Broader Connections
- The researchers coded interview data flexibly to maximize prejudice discrimination
#expands(0.75) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 509