Howard Becker in "Tricks of the Trade: How to Think About Your Research While You're Doing It" discusses an exercise, which he calls "the Wittgenstein trick," as follows:
If I take away from an event or object X some quality Y, what is left?
Steps:
1) Consider some phenomenon, idea, event, object, topic.
2) Consider some qualities, statements of fact, descriptions of that phenomenon.
3) From (1), mentally subtract those things in (2) that are accidental, contingient, or only specific to a unique instance.
4) What is left over? This core will be your concept.
"The Wittgenstein trick...lets us isolate the generic features of a series of cases we think have something in common, the features out of which we can construct the generalization that is a concept. Once we have isolated such a generic feature of some social relation or process and given it a name, and thus created a concept, we can look for the same phenomenon in places other than where we found it" (p. 141).
So, this is another exerceise I've been trying with my own research topics to try to nail down some researchable questions.
Take one area, the ways in which adoptive parents may speak of how they are and are not related to their children. There's a concept in there waiting to come out, but what is it?
How does anyone speak of how they are related, or tied, to others. Most globally, there are various ways of feeling "connected" to someone, especially family-wise: legally, psychologically, emotionally, sexually, socially, religiously, genetically, culturally, physically, temperamentally, etc. Then there are probably other dimensions in all of these routes to connection: a connection can be temporary or permanent, pleasant or unpleasant, involuntary or voluntary, appropriate or innappropriate, socially stigmatized or socially acceptable...
All of these and more are involved in this thing, this whatever it is I'm trying to nail down with the sample I will be looking at. So what can I strip away to reveal the concept?
Well, the adptive parent-child relationship is supposed to be permanent, not temporary (compare with foster parenting or guardianship), so I might subtract the temporary feature. And in the case of the particular sample I'll be using, there is no genetic relationship so I can remove that, too. (At least for now. As with all these features it may have to come back in as I try to conceptualize this thing with other groups...)
Similar to all parent-child relationships, adoptive parents (APs) and their children (even their adult children) are not supposed to be sexually connected to each other. Now, this brings up an intriguing point to linger on a while: Why is that? Likely, partly because a key in this instance is not that APs and their kids are not genetically related (which in other contexts may make sexual connections OK), but that they inhabit a certain legal and social relationship, and legally and socially folks so tied are not supposed to be involved in this way.
There might be a kind of trans-positioning with this, then. The idea is not new with me; others have noted this: Adoptive connections are legally and socially given what we might think of as a biological translation. At least currently in American adoption history, the legal standing of an adoptive parent is the same if that person were the biological (genetic) parent. An adoptive parent is positioned the same way she would be had she birthed the child herself.
Put that on hold for a minute.
I need to remember that I am wanting to explore "how parents talk about" this whateveritis. So, another thing I can jettison (again, for now) is any type of "objective" measure of the connection--besides noting that the APs and kids in this sample are all unrelated biologically. Also gone, survey responses. And I'm not trying to get into their heads or anything, so any type of projective measures are probably not what I want to look at with my concept. I'm interested in their talk, so something like "narratives" or "accounts" will likely be in the term making up the eventual concept.
Now. I talked earlier about "trans-positioning." It's more complex than that in the adoptive context. Again, this is not my idea, but it has been widely noted that part of the paradox in making adoptive and biological parenthood legally equal is that there still may be some stigma attached. Other people still may see a difference, or a "less than" or a "not really" in relation to adoptive parents. Some adoptive parents may even feel that way (like through "internalization")--But remember, it's not what's in their heads, but what they say, and it's not what others say but what these APs say. So I can get rid of things like "internalized stigma" or "changing social attitudes about adoption." What's left has something to do with how adoptive parents may or may not talk about perceived differences, as well as possibly the way they talk about others' perceptions.
Some of the other qualities of the phenomenon of AP-child connection: in the case of my sample the target children and their parents are all similar culturally, with no transracial or international adoptive placements. But this is not necessarily so in other adoptive contexts, so I'll subtract the necessity of cultural/racial/religious/ethnic similarity to make an adoptive parent-child tie. Heck, it's not even the case in biological parent-child relationships that both would be at the ends of the same racial, cultural, or religious tie. (Think Tiger Woods, for example.) In terms of interests, abilities, temperament: current genetic science will continue to uncover ways in which many of these qualities are genetically determined. So this will not be shared by APs and their children, right?
Well, not necessarily. Genetically, most of these qualities likely have a probabilistic nature to them--for example, we are still talking about a child receiving genetic input from two parents, so there is likely no 1-to-1 interest, temperament or any other type of "match" between any one parent and his biological child. Also, there is some role for the environment: How that shakes out in bio-related families is not predetermined.
But this is a huge area that I have no intentions of getting into right now. What I am willing to now say is that in APs' talk, they likely express some beliefs about how genetics and the environment contribute to their connections with their children and to parent-child relatedness generally. That, then, would be included in my concept, quite apart from whatever genetic and social science tells us about this issue.
And there also might be a kind of "weighting" involved...I'm not sure how to explain it, but a sense that a non-biologically related parent and child are well connected might be spoken of in a way that gives greater significance to that relationship than that given to a genetic parent and child's good connection. I have an intuition that APs may express some comparisons between their relatedness and biological parents' relatedness. And again, my concept wouldn't encompass "objective" comparisons (whatever they may be), but those that folks might express. Anyway. This is an interesting nugget, not fully formed, but worth keeping in here for now.
I'm starting to get an idea of what my eventual concept will and will not entail. And all this has brought to my mind some things I have already read and made notes on that may help me nail this down further. So my next job is to let this stew for a while, then go do some more reading and note-taking.
Thank you, Ludwig!
Posted by perry032 at December 14, 2004 02:49 PM