Showing papers by "Paul DiMaggio published in 2014"

Comment on Jerolmack and Khan, “Talk Is Cheap” Ethnography and the Attitudinal Fallacy

Abstract: The authors (Jerolmack and Khan [J&K]) argue that sociologists who use surveys and interviews to understand behavior ignore the situated nature of action, fail to theorize surveys or interviews as situations, and consequently draw incorrect conclusions from their data. Surveys, they argue, are good at ensuring the representativeness of individuals, but terrible at sampling variation in situations. In making a trenchant case for the situated nature of both behavior and the expression of cultural dispositions, and explicating the relevant virtues of ethnography, J&K constructively revive a conversation that sociologists neglect at great risk. Although I am sympathetic, I suspect J&K underestimate the ability of researchers to address the attitude–behavior consistency problem, which is really several problems, most of which are soluble. I shall describe five reasons that survey responses may not predict behavior and offer solutions to four of them. Part of my optimism reflects my view of culture. To be sure, meanings are negotiated in social and physical environments and situations constrain the expression of individual dispositions. But actors often enter into these negotiations with stable and consequential cultural dispositions. Culture, in this view, constitutes an ecology of representations, with social contexts