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25 years of Human Studies
Social science with a philosophical flavor

By David J. Craig

When George Psathas helped launch Human Studies at Boston University in 1978, few other social science journals encouraged researchers to inform their work with phenomenology, a 20th-century philosophy that asserts that meaning is defined by subjective experience.

	George Psathas Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

In championing phenomenological research, Human Studies helped inspire a number of sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, and others to forego large-scale quantitative studies, and instead to zoom in on the finer details of human behavior, observing how individuals understand their world and make choices about it.

A quarter of a century later, quantitative research methods remain dominant in the social sciences, but under the editorship of Psathas, a CAS sociology professor emeritus and a resilient champion of qualitative social research, Human Studies persists. The journal recently celebrated its 25th anniversary with a special issue that features essays from several of its most prominent contributors reflecting on the impact the journal has had on their careers. Included are Hisashi Nasu, a sociologist at Waseda University in Japan, Richard Zaner, a former Vanderbilt medical ethicist, and Kurt H. Wolff, a Brandeis sociologist, as well as Psathas.

“When I started Human Studies with colleagues from Brandeis, Boston College, and BU, the objective was to promote the idea that even papers that focus on a single case study can produce interesting and important analyses,” says Psathas, a CAS professor since 1968. “There was great interest in phenomenology in the social sciences in the 1970s, but if you used a phenomenological approach in your research, you still weren’t going to be published in any of the major journals. The editors would say, ‘Oh, that’s very interesting, but it’s too descriptive; it’s not real analysis.’”

Staying the course
Social science journals today favor quantitative research more than ever, Psathas says. Determined to stake out its credibility as a science, sociology, for instance, has essentially pushed ethnomethodology -- the branch of the discipline most directly influenced by phenomenology -- out of the academy. Ethnomethodology, which deals with the codes and conventions that underlie everyday social interactions, “ran into trouble because it presented itself as an alternative to conventional sociology,” says Psathas. “It was a very critical approach.”

However, in 25 years, Human Studies, which currently is distributed to more than 400 academic libraries in 20 nations, has deviated little from the goals Psathas announced in its inaugural issue. Encouraging submissions from sociology, psychology, political science, history, anthropology, linguistics, economics, and philosophy, it aims to advance, Psathas wrote in 1978, “the dialogue between philosophy and the social sciences: in particular between phenomenological, existential philosophy,” and corresponding social research approaches. In the journal’s pages can be found theoretical essays as well as intensive qualitative studies, but little number-crunching. In his own work, for example, Psathas has used photography to examine how the physical structure of public spaces influences social interactions, and how blind people navigate their environment -- a project for which he spent hours poking his way blindfolded around unfamiliar streets with a cane.

“One new area of research in which there is increasing interest in hiring ethnomethodologists is computer-supported cooperative work, which deals with the way humans work together using technology,” says Psathas. “Programmers, systems analysts, and systems designers need ethnomethodologists to help them understand the best ways to design technology. They’re not looking for someone to conduct a study with large numbers of interviews and surveys; they want researchers who can carefully observe how workers are actually using their systems.

“I see Human Studies as an incubator for people still interested in this kind of phenomenological orientation,” he continues, noting that people trained in such research approaches today tend to find academic jobs outside of sociology, such as in departments of linguistics and speech communication.
“A lot of young scholars we’ve published have told us that it was the only journal that would publish their work, and many of them have gone on to great careers.”

Open systems
Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, in the Netherlands, Human Studies has always been housed at BU, and it currently is supported in part by the CAS sociology department and in part by Southern Illinois University. Jeffrey Coulter, a CAS sociology professor, is the journal’s associate editor.

Psathas, whose books include Everyday Language and Conversation Analysis: The Study of Talk-in-Interaction, says the journal is unique even among social science journals that promote qualitative work, such as Qualitative Sociology, because it encourages dialogue between philosophy and the social sciences. Such dialogue, he says, is threatening to the social sciences for reasons that help explain why phenomenological research fell out of favor: for research to be perceived as scientific it must adhere to the rigorous norms of a discipline, which leaves little incentive for researchers to dabble in an approach built on an alternative philosophical framework.

But Psathas, who currently is writing a history of phenomenological research in American sociology, insists that periodic soul-mining is important for social scientists. “If you’re not philosophically informed, what happens when a brand-new idea explodes onto the scene?” he says. “How are you going to incorporate it into your work? Human Studies tries to show readers that philosophy is relevant to social science, that it directly relates to questions of epistemology and methodology.

“Part of what led me to read philosophy seriously for the first time, years after receiving my Ph.D. in sociology from Yale in 1956, was the dissatisfaction I found in conducting laboratory studies,” he says. “I felt that I was putting subjects into abstract situations and categorizing their actions in a way that didn’t show me what I wanted to know about human behavior. In phenomenology I discovered something I hadn’t been taught in school and which affected me deeply -- that social scientists could describe the experiences of people in real situations.”

21 February 2003
Boston University
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