Anne-Marie Weist

Traces of the Public Opinion: The Questionnaire in the Empirical Social Sciences (working title)

Notes, documents, and literature pertain to every research project in all fields of study. In some cases, such written material is accorded a special status; it forms the (frequently sole) material basis for treating a research question and gaining new insights. In our project, we investigate how, in historical climatology, social sciences, and history, written material is compiled and evaluated for research purposes: how, for instance, data for reconstructing temperature series follow from weather diaries of the seventeenth century, how files from a certain office become documents in an archive and ultimately a source in a historical study, or how surveys are conducted and the collected responses are transformed into data and scientifically robust statements. From a comparative perspective, our interest throughout concerns (1) what challenges are faced in individual contexts when dealing with written material and what practices are developed, (2) what evaluation standards apply for the constitution and analysis of written material in each case, and overall (3) what consequences basing research questions on written material has on scholarly praxis and the validity claims of scientific knowledge.

In cooperation with the external pageChair of Science Studies, University Luzern.

This project is part of a larger research initiative funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation: external page'Desktop-Studies: Documents as Research-Material in the Natural and Social Sciences and Humanities'.