Measuring Culture

Measuring Culture combines historical background and theoretical perspectives on measurement in the sociology of culture with practical steps on how to carry out empirical research on culture in today’s rapidly changing research environment. Written by nine authors from diverse research backgrounds, and with the input of many more (as detailed in the acknowledgements section, this book is the product of multiple conferences on the topic that included many more people than those listed as authors), Measuring Culture heroically manages to articulate a coherent voice about the intersection of two broadly contested concepts in sociology: measurement and culture. One of the strengths of the book is precisely the catholic stance the authors take on many of the ongoing, and largely unhelpful, debates about both measurement and culture. Gently setting these unhelpful debates aside, the book’s first major contribution is its two simple, clear, and unexpectedly profound assumptions: (1) culture is measurable, it is not an amorphous mist we live within; and (2) ‘‘there can be no measurement without interpretation’’ (p. 4). Bridging these two assumptions, the second major contribution of this book is its practical description, via exemplary research from a wide range of epistemological and methodological traditions, of how sociologists have combined the quantitative and qualitative, or the formal and hermeneutical, approaches to cultural sociology. The link between research question and method tends to be one of the more difficult aspects of the research process, and one that is also difficult to teach. This book takes this challenge head on, combining historical perspectives with current research to help readers build an intuition about research design. Where textbooks typically start with a method and provide empirical examples, this book is structured much closer to how scholars carry out real research: it starts with empirical examples of where culture is located in society—culture in people, culture in objects, and culture in social relationships— and then describes methods that are suited to measuring culture in each of those levels ofanalysis.Thefinalchapterprovidesadifferent perspective on the practical how question, describing via three case studies the iterative nature of research and the fluid movement between levels of analysis that is a common feature of much empirical work. The bulk of this book is the logically organized, jargon-free, and contextualized presentation of exemplary research in cultural sociology. In each of the examples provided, the authors focus on three key steps: (1) datifying culture—turning cultural processes into external objects, (2) measuring culture— transforming these data into quantifiable properties, and (3) the process of interpretation throughout. From the introduction, the authors are clear that measurement requires both data and interpretation, and that while there are many different ways to measure, there are also patterns in measurement that can help us carry out cultural research. They also clearly convey that both quantitative and qualitative data are amenable to measurement: ‘‘even data produced within the most qualitative traditions in cultural sociology. become amenable to more quantitative techniques as soon as they are externalized in the form of field notes or interview transcriptions’’ (p. 4, emphasis my own). After reading the introduction, I thus assumed that the authors would agree that counting something in data is a necessary (though not sufficient) step toward measurement. At the end of the book, however, after synthesizing the many examples they describe, I was less sure. Is counting necessary for measurement? Most of their examples, for example, discuss precise ways to quantify (or count) culture in qualitative or quantitative data. The section on measuring nondeliberative thinking, for example, (pp. 25–34), details multiple quantifying techniques, including forced-choice survey items (p. 26), Implicit Reviews 59