Critiquing and Evaluating David Crawford's Becoming a Man Research - Coursework Example

Critiquing and evaluating published research (David Crawfords research paper on “Becoming a man INTRODUCTION: When do men become men? That is probably a difficult question to answer. There are some cultures that have a socially accepted rite of passage- for example, the bar mitzvah in the Jewish culture- but most modern societies leave its male members to become men by default. What is more, none of the males seems to properly reflect when he truly begins to perceive himself as a fully grown adult, as a man and not a boy. It is in this context that David Crawford, a student of the University of Western Sydney, ventured out to find when men begin to perceive themselves as men. The purpose of Crawfords research paper, titled “Becoming a Man- The Views and Experiences of Some Second Generation Australian Males” and published in the Electronic Journal of Sociology in 2003, is to seek the answer to this very question (When does a male become a man?) with special reference to the Australian participants of Crawfords study. The research paper Crawford ultimately comes up with is interesting and reflects the researchers personal views on the matter. Personally, Crawford says at the end of the study, he felt himself becoming a man when he was “ritually and respectfully welcomed into the world of men...by a group of supportive men, at a mens retreat in northern California”, but he feels that currently, each male is left to his own personal means to become a man. He examines this statement, and others made by popular literature on the subject, in this research paper, and it is very interesting to go through Crawfords observations. METHODOLOGY Crawfords study is an ethnographic study with a phenomenological approach. It is first essential to examine what an ethnographic study is all about, and also what a phenomenological study entails. A) Ethnography and Crawfords research: Law, et al (1998) say that the goal of ethnographic research is “to tell the whole story of a group’s daily life, to identify from participants the cultural meanings and beliefs they attach to activities, events, behaviors, knowledge, rituals and lifestyle. They also identify patterns of the group.” The group here in Crawfords study includes young and mid-life Australian males aged between 20-26 and 35-45 years and hailing from the beach side suburb of Dee Why in Sydney and the village of Bowral southwest of the city. All of the males were second-generation Australians, with the exception of one black male who was born of immigrant parents, and all of them belonged to the lower middle class background in terms of occupation and educational qualifications. All of the men involved in the study are heterosexual; of the younger group, only two men had relationships with female partners at the time of the study, and of the older group, four men were divorced, two were single, and one had separated recently. Crawford purposely selected men from a social background which has received little attention from popular and academic literature on the subject, which mainly focuses upon middle class and professional men, and this was perhaps done to lend originality to the study. Additionally, Crawford recruited the participants through purposive (non-random, snowball) sampling, handpicking males who he thought were suitable for the study. “The sampling was conducted by placing notices in local newspapers and sports club bulletins, the use of a gatekeeper’ figure, as well as subsequent word-of-mouth recommendation from interviewees. During a phone conversation with the researcher, potential participants were informed about the study, including the requirement that they have lived in the local area for at least 10 years and be Australian-born. Participation was then on the basis of mutual agreement. The recommendation of a ‘gatekeeper’ figure was particularly important in accessing interviewees in Dee Why, where recruiting young males was difficult. Several potential interviewees said that they were not interested or failed to turn up for the interview.” However, it is seriously questionable whether the potential participants were indeed informed fully about the study, because later on in the research, when Crawford says he asked the participants the most vital question, that is, how they became a man, most participants express surprise. Crawford himself points out that they laugh nervously, chuckle, lean back in their chair, or roll their eyes. Also, snowball sampling was probably not a wise action on the part of the researcher. For one thing, snowball sampling involves existing study subjects recruiting future study subjects from among their acquaintances. This method of sampling maybe useful in recruiting subjects for a research that focuses on a sensitive topic such as drug addiction or prostitution, for which subjects cannot be easily and openly found, but in the present case, simple random sampling may have been perfectly alright. Snowball sampling indeed is of a disadvantage because of the biases involved. As for the use of a gatekeeper figure, Crawford justifies his action by pointing out that recruiting subjects for the research was difficult in Dee Why, and therefore the gatekeeper figure came in useful. B) Phenomenology and Crawfords research: On the matter of phenomenological studies, Law et al says that a phenomenological study seeks to study the phenomenon of an experience that the participants in the study have gone through. “Appropriate methods of data gathering and analysis include in-depth interviews, written anecdotes, philosophy, poetry or art.” (Law, et al, 1998) In this study, the experience in question is the experience of becoming a man. Crawford says he “used multiple methods: case study methodology, life-history, in-depth interviews, and participant observation” to gather empirical data, but how effective these were is another question altogether. First of all, the in-depth interviews, says Crawford, were done at places where the interviewees felt themselves at ease, at places the interviewees had themselves chosen- such as their homes, or public places such as cafés and pubs. Rather than a fixed schedule of questions, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the aid of an interview guide to lend a more conversation-like atmosphere. “Interviews were audio-taped and transcribed, the data was coded and analysed using an analytic induction approach,” says Crawford. Case records were prepared for each participant “and then cross-case interpretive analysis was conducted, comparing and contrasting common themes and patterns.” Crawford could probe the participants comments thanks to the semi-structured model of the interview. The interviews lasted from about 60 to 80 minutes each, and follow-up interviews were conducted in two cases. Conducting interviews at public places might not have been a good idea because it is likely that the particpants attention would be distracted by the happenings at the café or pub. Secondly, audio-taping an interview was also not a wise decision since subjects become automatically self-conscious and put on an invisible guard around themselves when they see their statements being recorded- but perhaps this could not have been avoided, and moreover, since the participants knew they were subjects of a research, they may have been prepared to have their statements taped and may have decided to be candid enough to help the researcher. Thirdly, using a semi-structured model of an interview was commendable, because it provided Crawford with the leniency to respond to the participants comments spontaneously. However, Crawford says that the interviews lasted 60-80 minutes, but later on in the research paper, he says that he did not ask the vital question of when they became a man before about 45 minutes into the interview. Simple mathematics will show that obviously, Crawford wasted a lot of time putting the participants at ease, and did not spend too much time in what he calls “probing”. Additionally, not much evidence is found in the paper of Crawfords “probing” of the participants comments, nor is much evidence found of the other methods of gathering data which Crawford says he used. For example, the researcher says he used the life-history of the participants to gather empirical data, but nowhere in the study is any participants background discussed, except for small mentions of the facts that all the participants with the exception of one were Whites and had been born of Australian parents, and that all of them were from the lower middle class background in terms of occupation and educational qualifications, and whether the participants are single, or in a relationship, or married, or divorced and/or have kids. INFERENCES FROM THE RESEARCH AND COMPARISONS WITH EXISTING LITERATURE Crawford draws his conclusions from his study and compares them to what existing literature (academic or popular) already has to say on the subject. Popular writers believe that in Western societies, males are left to become men by chance. A. Kipnis suggests in his 1991 book Knights without Armor: A Practical Guide for Men in Quest of Masculine Soul that at present, the only rites of passage available to male youths are the cult of the sports hero in which they learn to endure pain in return for glory. M. Messner in his 1992 book Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity and M. Drummond in his 1995 book The Social Construction of Masculinity: An Investigation into the lives of elite male athletes observe that although through sport, boys learn to endure pain and to attach importance to achievement, the transition from boyhood to manhood is actually a lengthy process of socialisation, not a memorable social ritual or a deliberate, conscious process. This is indeed consistent with the perceptions of the participants in Crawfords study. Kipnis also says that for his group of American men, work, combat, independence, alcohol, sex and fathers approval were markers of the transition from boyhood to manhood. Indeed, many of the respondents in Crawfords study do feel that they probably became a man when they first had sex, or when they first got drunk, or even when they first became a father, but none of them mention work, or independence -both financial and social, that is, from parents- as such markers. Some of them feel that maybe being given the right for vote at 18 years of age would qualify as a marker of the transition from boyhood to manhood, but actually, it is not really so. This is consistent with what the Australian family therapist S. Biddulph says in his 1995 book Manhood. Eventually, Crawford concludes that not only is there very little literature on the transition of males from boyhood to adulthood, but there is a serious lack of positive cultural education about “the social dimensions of masculinity”, education that “identifies the dominant values, beliefs and social practices”. Crawford feels that there is an urgent need for such education that would also include the importance of distinguishing maleness from masculinity. Crawford cites the example of the Mens Health and Wellbeing Association which conducts a pathway to manhood project where young teenage boys learn life-skills, undertake physical challenges, and learn the importance of life-enhancing values and respect for women. Typically, these boys spend time with men who seek to enhance their self-esteem. “This education emphasizes positive, healthy elements of masculinity, which contrasts with the predominance of much negativity about masculinity in Western culture, and the prevalence of a deficit-model of men so noticeable in academic discourses,” says the researcher, implying that there should be more such organisations around the world. Crawfords inferences about the main question of how males become men as inferred from his study are rather arbitrary, given the small scope of his research. There is no way anyone can agree or disagree with existing literature simply on the basis of a small survey of only 14 males from a certain social background and a certain time frame and a certain locality. Crawfords study has serious drawbacks when one considers how time- and area-specific his findings are. He should have embarked upon a study with a larger scope, which would have involved randomly picking males from various social backgrounds and localities and age groups. It is interesting to see that Crawford only examines males from the age brackets of 20-26 and 35-45 years. He makes no mention of males younger than 20, nor of males older than 45, and yet it is hard to think that males younger than 20 or older than 45 would not be able to tell one when they thought they became a man. Moreover, the definition of manhood is left to the individual participants and the way they interpret manhood, which obviously would vary from person to person, and while this shows leniency, it is also disadvantageous. In such ways, Crawfords study is rather limited. CONCLUSION In this essay, Crawfords research paper has been critiqued in what is hoped is a concise and comprehensive manner. The advantages and disadvantages of Crawfords methodology have been examined, and with respect to his inferences from his study, it has been seen how limited the scope of Crawfords research was. Yet, at the same time, it must also be said, that given the time and resources at the researchers disposal, he probably made the best use of things, and his effort is commendable. The least that can be said of his research is that it is an extremely interesting piece of literature on the subject of masculinity. REFERENCE: Crawford, David. “Becoming a Man- The Views and Experiences of Some Second Generation Australian Males”. In Electronic Journal of Sociology. Volume 7, 2004, Number 3, published August 2003. ISSN: 1198 3655. Law, M., Stewart, D., Letts, L., Pollock, N., Bosch, J., & Westmorland, M. “Guidelines for Critical Review Form-Qualitative Studies”, 1998. Retrieved from Web on March , 2009. Read More

Crawford purposely selected men from a social background which has received little attention from popular and academic literature on the subject, which mainly focuses upon middle class and professional men, and this was perhaps done to lend originality to the study. Additionally, Crawford recruited the participants through purposive (non-random, snowball) sampling, handpicking males who he thought were suitable for the study. “The sampling was conducted by placing notices in local newspapers and sports club bulletins, the use of a gatekeeper’ figure, as well as subsequent word-of-mouth recommendation from interviewees.

During a phone conversation with the researcher, potential participants were informed about the study, including the requirement that they have lived in the local area for at least 10 years and be Australian-born. Participation was then on the basis of mutual agreement. The recommendation of a ‘gatekeeper’ figure was particularly important in accessing interviewees in Dee Why, where recruiting young males was difficult. Several potential interviewees said that they were not interested or failed to turn up for the interview.

” However, it is seriously questionable whether the potential participants were indeed informed fully about the study, because later on in the research, when Crawford says he asked the participants the most vital question, that is, how they became a man, most participants express surprise. Crawford himself points out that they laugh nervously, chuckle, lean back in their chair, or roll their eyes. Also, snowball sampling was probably not a wise action on the part of the researcher. For one thing, snowball sampling involves existing study subjects recruiting future study subjects from among their acquaintances.

This method of sampling maybe useful in recruiting subjects for a research that focuses on a sensitive topic such as drug addiction or prostitution, for which subjects cannot be easily and openly found, but in the present case, simple random sampling may have been perfectly alright. Snowball sampling indeed is of a disadvantage because of the biases involved. As for the use of a gatekeeper figure, Crawford justifies his action by pointing out that recruiting subjects for the research was difficult in Dee Why, and therefore the gatekeeper figure came in useful. B) Phenomenology and Crawfords research: On the matter of phenomenological studies, Law et al says that a phenomenological study seeks to study the phenomenon of an experience that the participants in the study have gone through.

“Appropriate methods of data gathering and analysis include in-depth interviews, written anecdotes, philosophy, poetry or art.” (Law, et al, 1998) In this study, the experience in question is the experience of becoming a man. Crawford says he “used multiple methods: case study methodology, life-history, in-depth interviews, and participant observation” to gather empirical data, but how effective these were is another question altogether. First of all, the in-depth interviews, says Crawford, were done at places where the interviewees felt themselves at ease, at places the interviewees had themselves chosen- such as their homes, or public places such as cafés and pubs.

Rather than a fixed schedule of questions, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the aid of an interview guide to lend a more conversation-like atmosphere. “Interviews were audio-taped and transcribed, the data was coded and analysed using an analytic induction approach,” says Crawford. Case records were prepared for each participant “and then cross-case interpretive analysis was conducted, comparing and contrasting common themes and patterns.” Crawford could probe the participants comments thanks to the semi-structured model of the interview.

The interviews lasted from about 60 to 80 minutes each, and follow-up interviews were conducted in two cases. Conducting interviews at public places might not have been a good idea because it is likely that the particpants attention would be distracted by the happenings at the café or pub.

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