Know What I Mean?

Symbolic Interactionism has a scholarly website and encyclopedias tell one what it is. I am studying research, and I have just encountered it.

In the same year that man walked on the moon for the first time, this term landed into the unsuspecting laps of sociologists, courtesy of Herbert Blumer. Was it "a great leap for mankind"? Surely one knows that what one means is not always what one says and that what one says, one may or may not mean. Ask Alice…

Stevie Smith Not Waving But Drowning (1957). ‘Nuff said.

We act and react according to what we see in gestures, words or any kind of symbol that we can interpret.

OK it justifies qualitative research.

Research is about asking the right question, so quantitative research data may be compromised if the numbers relate to a failure in Symbolic Interactionism e.g. the respondent to a questionnaire misinterpreted or misunderstood the question and said 4 in a range of 1 to 4, meaning good, when the question set 4 meaning bad. Isn’t that just poor communication or poor testing prior to release of a research tool?

I find it hard to see the fuss though. Surely it has been long known that children understand questions differently to adults. Ask a child what a long period of time in their future might be and they may reply with a figure in days, whereas an adult thinks in periods of years. Hence a child may answer the question of how old they are with "6 and three quarters" whereas an adult might answer 21, though nearly 29 .

Symbolic Interactionist joke

A man was cruising in his car when he realised he was lost. He stopped and asked a passer-by for guidance. Being a Symbolic Interactionist, she replied "I wouldn’t start from here, if I was going there."