De hachas vs. bisturies en la investigación social Cómo se hizo “La vida cotidiana en las nuevas familias”

Abstract

I usually tell my students: rather than working with scalpels in the Social Sciences we work with axes because social reality is not amenable to the fine cuts of the former but to the coarse ones of the latter. This is not due to our inability to develop precision techniques and methods but to the specific nature of social actors. We are not rocks, we modify ourselves with each measurement act. We are more concerned with giving a good impression of ourselves than with being as trustful as our interviewers expect us to be. Our opinions and attitudes are sensitive to social pressure. Measuring with”two decimals” (with scalpels) measures creates an illusion of precision that social reality does not stand. The validity of social knowledge emerges when several measurements (with axes), from different types of data sources, techniques and time perspectives, move in the same direction. I here show how I do research from the above mentioned point of view. To that end I use a piece of research resulting from almost a decade of studying the interactions between gender transformation of the labour market and family transformations in Argentina since the beginning of the 80´s. My question to what extent the expansion of female participation in the labor force come along with an equivalent expansion of males in the household and children care at home? Searching for an answer I triangulated statistical data with interview data from 200 of contemporary, one- and two-breadwinner families, from middle and low socio-economic sectors, with data from the former generation provided by members of contemporary families (“chroniclers”) regarding their parents’ families, and from members of 42 families (“protagonists”) from the former generation, in addition to 35 similar families interviewed seven years earlier.