Q-Rhetoric and Controlled Equivocation: Revising “The Scientific Study of Subjectivity” for Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration

ABSTRACT

This article offers a revision to an existing social science methodology, Q methodology, through “Q-Rhetoric.” After detailing Q methodology’s theoretical underpinnings and practical method, and persistent critiques of the methodology, the article employs perspectives from rhetorical theory and Amerindian anthropology to suggest a methodological correction. It concludes by detailing the use of Q-Rhetoric to intervene in a Wisconsin stream management controversy, proposing Q-Rhetoric as a pragmatic and theoretically sound methodology for working across disciplinary divides.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecological restoration
• research methods
• rhetoric of science
• rhetorical theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Q methodology is so named to distinguish itself from normal factor analysis, known as R method.

2. On the point of subjectivity in Q methodology, as Brown (1986) described, “Only subjective opinions are at issue in Q, and although they are typically unprovable, they can nevertheless be shown to have structure and form, and it is the task of Q-technique to make the form manifest for purposes of observation and study” (p. 58). Twenty years later, Brown (2006) characterized Q methodology as working by “taking as its raw materials the thoughts and feelings of these individuals, as expressed in their own words, which, when submitted to statistical analysis, results in factors of operant subjectivity” (p. 378). Q methodology works to take a “scientific” – which, in Q’s terms, means rigorous and objective – approach to studying self-reported subjective perspectives.

3. Where factor analysis typically searches for correlations between tests or variables, Q methodology inverts that process, searching for correlations across individuals. As Watts and Stenner (2012) explained, Q can “indicate any method which inverts the R methodological tradition by employing persons as its variables and in which traits, tests, abilities and so on, are treated as the sample or population” (p. 12).

4. Unlike a Likert-type item that probes respondents about their level of agreement with a particular statement and then places individually ranked statements in relationship with other statements, Q methodology prompts respondents to rank order a series of statements against other statements, and then places respondents in relationship with other respondents via those responses.

5. Principal components analysis provides Eigenvalues and percent of explained variance per factor. The absolute and relative sizes of the Eigenvalues are used to decide how many factors to keep for rotation. Note that “factors” in Q methodology refer, for discursively based sorts, to particular statements from the Q set.

6. An interest in ontology certainly sits near the center of discussions in what we might refer to broadly as rhetorical new materialisms. Barnett and Boyle (2016) offered a recent gloss of rhetorical ontology, suggesting, “We take ontology to be fundamentally rhetorical. That is, ontology is an ongoing negotiation of being through relations among what we might, on some occasions, call human and/or nonhuman. We thus take ontology to be the pervasive relationality of all things – the means by which things come into relation and have effects on other things in ways that resonate strongly with existing and emerging understandings of rhetoric” (pp. 8–9, emphasis original). We, too, feel that rhetoric speaks to ontological inquiry. But, unlike Barnett and Boyle’s (2016) categorization of ontology as rhetorical, we find more common ground with Graham and Herndl’s (2013) focus on postplural theories of multiple ontologies. That approach “describes differently situated material activities that produce different objects” (p. 110). Not ontology, but ontologies. Graham and Herndl (2013) build from Mol (2002), who argued, “ontology is not given in the order of things, but that, instead, ontologies are brought into being, sustained, or allowed to wither away in common, day to day, sociomaterial practices’’ (p. 6). The methodological practices of different disciplines, in this view, bring into being multiple ontologies, in our case, of Kickapoo Valley stream banks. As we argue in this article, the shift from Q methodology to Q-Rhetoric facilitates engagement with that multiplied process of bringing into being. Not a notion of ontology as rhetoric. But a rhetorical notion of multiple ontologies.

7. Although a deep exploration of Amerindian perspectivism is outside the scope of this article, we are compelled to say a word about perspectivism in Amerindian cosmologies, as the term has the possibility of being interpreted by readers as the kind of postmodern perspectivalism that rhetorical new materialism has worked so hard to reject. (Indeed, the rejection of incommensurability’s inherent perspectivalism is precisely the point of Graham and Herndl’s [2013] introduction of multiple ontologies into rhetorical studies.) But, as Kirsch, 2013) detailed, “In contrast to cultural relativism, in which different cultures are said to provide multiple views of a single, underlying reality, the alternative suggested by these myths is that all beings see the world in the same way, as persons do (Viveiros de Castro, 1998). What differs is the world they see; every species sees a different nature from all of the others (Turner, 2009, p. 26). There are multiple realities of which only one is ordinarily visible. The Brazilian anthropologist Viveiros de Castro (1998, 2004b) calls this perspectivism” (p. 189–190). Perspectivism, in Viveiros de Castro’s lexicon, is ontological not relativist.

8. Although we do not go into detail here about community values mapping, interested readers can review existing articles for details (Forrester et al., 2015; Raymond et al., 2009).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Kickapoo Valley Reforestation Fund in the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and a New Directions Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Caroline Gottschalk Druschke

Caroline Gottschalk Druschke is an Assistant Professor of Composition & Rhetoric in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she fuses rhetorical and ecological perspectives to intervene in controversies over freshwater streams.

Eric G. Booth

Eric G. Booth is an Assistant Scientist – Ecohydrology in the Departments of Agronomy and Environmental Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison developing methods to monitor and model watershed and stream processes to foster sustainable management.

Emma Lundberg

Emma Lundberg is a Ph.D. student in the Environment and Resources program through the Nelson Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her dissertation research is grounded in recreational fisheries, social sciences, and river restoration.