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- All Subjects: Methodology
- Creators: Bowers, Nicole
- Creators: Brayboy, Bryan McK.J.
Description
I began this thesis because I was confused about economics. I wondered why there were so many different models. I didn't understand how they fit together. I was also confused by the assumptions being made. For instance, the assumption that humans are rational utility-maximizers did not seem to agree with my own experiences. With my director Dr. Edward Schlee's help, my thesis has become an inquiry into the state of economic methodology, both in theory and in practice. The questions that drive this paper are: How do economists choose between theories? What is the purpose of economic theory? What is the role of empirical data in assessing models? What role do assumptions play in theory evaluation, and should assumptions make sense? Part I: Methodology is the theoretical portion of the paper. I summarize the essential arguments of the two main schools of thought in economic methodology, and argue for an updated methodology. In Part II: A case study: The expected utility hypothesis, I examine methodology in practice by assessing a handful of studies that seek to test the expected utility hypothesis. Interestingly, I find that there is a different between what economists say they are doing, and what they actually seem to be doing. Throughout this paper, I restrict my analysis to microeconomic theory, simply because this is the area with which I am more familiar. I intend this paper to be a guide for my fellow students and rising economists, as well as for already practicing economists. I hope it helps the reader better understand methodology and improve her own practice.
ContributorsKang, Dominique (Author) / Schlee, Edward (Thesis director) / Schoellman, Todd (Committee member) / Boerner, Rochus (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
Law and science are fundamental to the operation of racism in the United States. Law provides structure to maintain and enforce social hierarchies, while science ensures that these hierarchies are given the guise of truth. Biologists and geneticists have used race in physical sciences to justify social differences, while criminologists, sociologists, and other social scientists use race, and Blackness in particular, as an explain-all for criminality, poverty, or other conditions affecting racialized peoples. Social and physical sciences profoundly impact conceptualizations and constructions of race in society, while juridical bodies give racial science the force of law—placing legal benefits and criminal punishments into play. Yet, no formal rules govern the use of empirical data in opinions of the Supreme Court. My dissertation therefore studies the Court’s use of social scientific evidence in two key cases involving race and discrimination to identify what, if any, social scientific standards the Court has developed for its own analysis of scientific evidence. In so doing, I draw on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Institutional Ethnography (IE) to develop a methodological framework for the study and use of social sciences in the law. Critical Race scholars generally argue that race is a social and legal construct and racism is endemic, and permanent, while Institutional Ethnography provides a social scientific method for rigorous study of the law by mapping and illuminating relationships of power manifested in social institutions that construct consciousness and place for marginalized groups in society. Combining methods of IE with epistemologies of CRT, I propose Critical Race Methodologies in the study of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin and Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. These two cases from recent terms of the Supreme Court involve heavy use of social sciences in briefing and at oral argument, and both cases set standards for racial inclusiveness in Texas. Throughout this dissertation, I look at how law and social sciences co-construct racial meanings and racial power, and how law and social science understand and misunderstand one another in attempting to scientifically understand the role of race in the United States.
ContributorsChin, Jeremiah Augustus (Author) / Brayboy, Bryan McK.J. (Thesis advisor) / Tsosie, Rebecca (Committee member) / Gomez, Alan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
This dissertation deals with the confluence of neoliberal and dominant Western social pressures in tension with researchers and educators striving toward a more sustainable world in light of the Anthropocene. Although scientists see the Anthropocene as a problem of human activity and environmental degradation, many social scientists and humanities researchers also see it as a problem with entrenched ways of thought. Current ways of thought complicit in the making of the Anthropocene include centering all thought, control, and agency in the radically individual human, centering science as the only legitimate access to knowledge, and presenting that knowledge as apolitical absolute truth. I engage in research creation activated by the minor gestures of human/nature entanglement in the Anthropocene and the promise of place in environmental and sustainability education. As such, I embark on the invention of a new ecology of practices that takes the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead as their guiding foundation. As part of this invention circumventing normative neoliberal and Western logics, I take Ajo, Arizona and the surrounding Sonoran Desert as a partner in more-than-human process inquiry. I live in Ajo and explore the Sonoran Desert for four months of data generation employing basic techniques of ethnography divorced from their neopositivist founding theories.
Bodies generated from my entanglement with Ajo and the desert participate in inventing Remixing Data Experiences (RDE), a novel data engagement technique. Through RDE, my more-than-human partners and I create ideas by engaging in arts-based techniques that form multimedia art-workings. The ideas generated include Oasis, Decline, Celebrate, Precarity, and Directions. I respond to each idea through anarchival written texts in a variety of genres including ethnographic memoir, short fiction, essay, ballad, and talk poem. I put these ideas into conversation with current methodological and education literature to illustrate that aesthetic-based inquiry contributes new ways forward in the Anthropocene. These new ways include rhythms of certainty and uncertainty in knowledge creation, participating in reciprocal affective capabilities of bodies in joyful knowing, developing modest abstractions that frequently engage concrete experience, and inclusion of aesthetic experiences in learning and inquiry.
ContributorsBowers, Nicole (Author) / Carlson, David L (Thesis advisor) / Koro, Mirka (Committee member) / Jordan, Michelle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
This multimodal study brought an open, constructively critical challenge to the standard means of process in, and knowledge production from, qualitative inquiry. Using as a context, dyslexia, and the assistive technology lifeworlds of postsecondary students, this study co-partnered with six college students with dyslexia. Co-partnership allowed for an emergence of new awareness that the experience of dyslexia and assistive technology is mediated through innumerable dynamics of interactions with and through the world. Methodologically, the study suggested that it is possible to: (a) situate, center, and validate disability throughout all phases of qualitative inquiry; (b) make the discrete parts of action research more inclusive of disability; (c) reduce physical and intellectual access barriers to qualitative inquiry; and (d) regard as reasonable and rigorous research that is produced by bodies and minds that may not process information in typical ways. Emancipatory action research was used to thread together an understanding of the complexities of self, being, and reality for a marginalized group and how systems, structures, interactions, spaces, and language are superimposed on experiences of disability. The emancipatory spirited study allowed space for co-constructed meaning making through dynamic multimodalities of method including audio-visual data co-constructed through narrative storytelling; an analysis through deep listening and video editing – illuminating ‘bright spots’ in the broader lifeworld perspective of dyslexia and assistive technology. The innovative co-constructed products of the dissertation were a 2-hour film, a researcher reflection video, professional development guides for assistive technology and qualitative inquiry, and a methods chapter as part of an edited book prospectus. By engaging with this study, the audience will experience consciousness raising with respect to disability experience and witness a reclaiming of the voice of that experience through inclusive research. This study offers a transformative perspective for future work by inviting critical consideration and co-construction of meaning of an expanded conceptualization of assistive technology as an embodied, negotiated experience; and increases awareness that diverse bodyminds offer powerful narratives of diversity in the human condition and why that matters. .
ContributorsBunch, Jacob Colby (Author) / Graves-Wolf, Leigh (Thesis advisor) / Bowers, Nicole (Thesis advisor) / Harrop, Lance (Committee member) / Nusbaum, Emily A. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023