Quantitative research and issues of political sensitivity in rural China
Name
16Tsai_edit - 060109 - SENT.pdf
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101.85 KB
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Checksum (MD5)
30c55e76455a81363171a964fa204e0e
Author(s)
Tsai, Lily L.
Date Issued
December 2010
Journal
Contemporary Chinese Politics: New Sources, Methods and Field Strategies
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Citation
Tsai, Lily L. "Quantitative research and issues of political sensitivity in rural China." In Contemporary Chinese politics: new sources, methods, and field strategies, edited by Allen Carlson et al. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2010.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Political sensitivity is always a challenge for the scholar doing fieldwork in nondemocratic and transitional systems, especially when doing surveys and quantitative research. Not only are more research topics likely to be politically sensitive in these systems, but in trying to collect precise and unbiased data to give us a quantitative description of a population, we are sometimes doing exactly what the government – and sometimes certain members of that population -- would like to prevent. In this chapter, I discuss some of the methodological and ethical issues that face researchers working in these contexts and describe strategies for dealing with these issues. I argue that in these contexts a “socially embedded” approach to survey research that carefully attends to the social relationships inherent in the survey research process can help alleviate problems of political sensitivity, protect participants and researchers in the survey research process, and maximize data quality.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Political Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item2705615/?site_locale=en_GB
