ABSTRACT
When I was in graduate school, I was totally awed by my advisor Edward Rose’s ability to look at reams and reams of computer print out and figure out from that looking how next to proceed. When I was an undergraduate, I was totally taken with the challenge of figuring out the genetic make-up of the drosophila in my mating experiments. And when I was not yet a school child, I spent hours during the summer organizing and categorizing the quartz-like gravel that filled in the 238 steps leading from our summer cottage to the lake front. I have done qualitative research following the standard logico-empirical
research protocol of propositions, hypotheses, and tests (Richardson 1990), and I have taught graduate seminars in theory that favored that approach. Inductive work was viewed as relevant for “exploratory” work, when the student did not know much about the problem s/he was planning to study, but it was not considered the right approach for actually testing hypotheses. Although the logico-empirical approach to knowledge-making has satisfied my needs for direction and closure, my greatest pleasure has been in working inductively: immersing myself in the “data”—the print-outs, the matings, the gravel-trying to discover what I might. One of the major things I have discovered is that theory can be discovered. Of course, the idea of an applied phenomenology-looking at something
without a lens to look through-is an absurdity. I look at the world through my sociological lens, but that lens is more like a crystal than an eye-glass, thereby inviting refraction upon refraction. My need for intellectual novelty is great. Sociology suits me because it
allows for near endless possibilities for categorizing, conceptualizing, and revisioning. It even allows for alternative ways of doing and telling about research. Those alternative ways have deepened my understanding of my field, my research, and myself. I tell you all of this because I believe that one does one’s best and most enjoyable work when one is true to one’s own disposition.
