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Abstract:
From the perspective of critical psychology, I offer one example of a survey instrument-developed with and through queer theoretical frames-that reflects a commitment both to statistical rigor and feminist objectivity. This instrument, the Sexual Orientation Beliefs Scale (SOBS), examines complex relationships between heterosexist attitudes and ontologies of sexuality-in other words, beliefs about what sexual orientation actually is. I argue that the SOBS's unique analytic potential is to reveal relationships between attitudes and beliefs that are otherwise obscured by hegemonic discourse about biological essentialism. Finally, I introduce the results of one study that took a "person-centered" analytic approach, as opposed to a "variable-centered" approach, and found evidence of the weakness of biological-determinist beliefs about sexual orientation in distinguishing between individuals with high versus low levels of modern homonegativity. I suggest that with queer theory-informed instrumentation, this person-centered approach possesses a provisional capacity to function as a "queer method."
"Subjugated" standpoints are preferred because they seem to promise more adequate, sustained, objective, transforming accounts of the world. But how to see from below is a problem requiring at least as much skill with bodies and language, with the mediations of vision, as the "highest" technoscientific visualizations.
-Donna Haraway, "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective"
I want to be clear about what I am not going to do here. First, I am not offering a defense of quantitative social inquiry. This has been done to varying degrees of success by many people who are more sophisticated statisticians than I (e.g., Jayaratne 1983; Westerman 2014). Rather, on the occasion of guest editors Amin Ghaziani and Matt Brim's provocation to consider "challenging normative conceptions of what constitutes positivist, post-positivist, essentialist, constructionist, interpretivist, and queer social research" (2015), I am attempting to engage with one dominant, long-standing line of reasoning among critical social scientists and humanists that suggests that mathematical reduction is fundamentally problematic (Krenz and Sax 1986; Michell 2003; Pugh 1990). In this frame, essentially all attempts at quantitative measurement are necessarily inaccurate, misrepresentative, and potentially violent, particularly those contemporary approaches that we might identify with the rise of post-positivism (Eagly and Riger 2014). To the post-positivist, the myth of objective reality is apparently abandoned but actually reconstituted in the search...