יום ב' 25.05.2009 , 18:00 - 20:00
חדר 449 בנין גילמן
Professor Nancy Cartwright,
London School of Economics and
University of California, San Diego
Evidence-based policy and its ranking schemes:
So, where’s ethnography?
Commentator:
Ruth Weintraub, Tel-Aviv Univeristy
התכנסות לקפה וכיבוד קל בשעה 17:30, ליד חדר 449
ההרצאה תינתן בשפה האנגלית!
.Evidence-based policy is widely mandated now throughout the UK, the USA and increasingly in Europe. Mandates invite policing and policing calls for standards for compliance. So there are now on offer a host of advice guides about what counts as good evidence. Most of these are ranking schemes, ranking schemes that, not surprisingly, do not rank individual evidence claims but rather rank methods for producing evidence. Ethnographic methods seem never to appear in these rankings, presumably dropping off the bottom (along with physics’ favourite, derivation from theory, and biology’s tracing of causal pathways), beneath even the lowly ‘expertise’, which is generally the only non-statistical method on the lists. This talk will pinpoint some genuine virtues of the statistical methods listed, more basic than the usual grounds (‘guarding against bias’) for endorsing them, as well as concomitant vices, and raise the question of how well ethnography can compete on the virtues and how much it can help make up for the vices