SPECIAL SESSION: Thinking Through Methods and Living the Methods Life

Description/Overview: Over the last 4 decades social science studies of the biobehavioral and social sciences and a host of theories in the critical traditions have engendered serious challenges to what we in the health sciences thought we knew about methods. Increasingly, methods are seen less as tools for the discovery than for the creation of knowledge and (in the words of anthropologist Annemarie Mol) less as "opening windows on the world" than as "interfering" with it. In this presentation, I contrast prevailing ideas about research methods—as for example, tools that human actors use, and means to study cultures, study discourses, and to test interventions—with alternative understandings of them as themselves actors, cultural performances, discourses, and interventions. I describe the plasticity as opposed to fixed nature of methods as methods become what they are in interaction with users; and the shifting nature of researcher selves as, for example, pragmatic realists and soft constructivists. I then turn to the obstacles to mindful, significant research reinforced by the qualitative/quantitative research divide, that is, the unfortunate but still tenacious view of inquiry as divided into two parts. This divide reifies false distinctions between, for example, subjective and objective, inductive and deductive, and word and number, which are in turn reinforced in the literature on mixed methods research. I address the challenges for the teaching and learning of methods in the health sciences posed by current debates about methods and the new urgency to produce usable and actionable research findings. Having focused on methods, I then turn to a consideration of how I came to live the methods life. I did not plan it but rather fell in to it. I describe the influence that my doctoral education in American Studies (in my program, a humanities field emphasizing history and literature) has had on my research career and my understanding of methods and of how life and methodology (in the words of anthropologist Rayna Rapp) “bleed” into each other. I reflect on what it means to choose methods as a substantive area of research, and the role aesthetics plays in what individuals choose to study and how they choose to study it.