Department seminar: Julie Zahle
The Department of Social Anthropology is happy to announce the upcoming seminar with Dr. Julie Zahle, Research Fellow, Department of Philosophy, University of Bergen. The title of the lecture is "Epistemic Values and Multiple Methods in Social Research".
Main content
Seminar paper
Epistemic Values and Multiple Methods in Social Research
In social research, multiple data gathering methods are often combined within a single study. In this paper, I examine the concurrent use of two methods: participant observation and qualitative interviews. The question I address is: what is the rationale behind their joint usage? The two most common rationales appeal to comprehensiveness and convergent confirmation respectively. I point to a third significant way to motivate their combined use: it allows the generation of complementary evidence that puts the researcher in a better position to confirm that her data manifest central epistemic values. I refer to this as the rationale of blended epistemic value enhancement.
About the lecturer
Julie Zahle is a research fellow at the Department of Philosophy at University of Bergen. She is specialized in the philosophy of the social sciences. Her main areas of research are: values in science, the individualism/holism debate, qualitative methods, research ethics, social theories of practice, the philosophy of anthropology and sociology, and the role of science in society. Zahle is the author of multiple journal articles and book chapters. She is a co-founder, and member of the steering committee, of the European Network of the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (ENPOSS).