Studying-Up and Studying-Across: At-Home Research of Governmental Violence Organizations

• Published in: Qualitative sociology Vol. 33; no. 3; pp. 275 - 295
• Main Authors: Gazit, Nir, Maoz-Shai, Yael
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston Springer US 01.09.2010; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Arab Israeli relations; Arab-Israeli conflict; Armed Forces; Concept formation; Cross Cultural Psychology; Ethical dilemmas; Ethics; Ethnicity; Israel; Methodology; Military personnel; Military research; National security; Nationalism; Personality and Social Psychology; Political conflicts; Positioning; Research methodology; Researchers; Respondents; Security; Security personnel; Sex; Social Sciences; Sociology; Violence; Ethics; Ethno-nationalism; Military research
• ISSN: 0162-0436; 1573-7837
• DOI: 10.1007/s11133-010-9156-y

Studying the military and other security organizations is challenging for both methodological and ethical reasons. Studying these domains “at home,” literally in the researcher’s own country, complicates things even further. This article discusses these intricacies by proposing a dynamic conceptualization of the subject-object relationship in the study of the military and security in Israel. This conceptualization illuminates the effects of the dynamic positioning of the researcher in four social fields: the academic, the military-security, gender, and the ethno-national. The actual influence of these fields and their interrelations changes throughout the phases of research. We argue that when researchers and their respondents have similar ethno-national affiliation and military experiences, the dichotomous relations between them break down and give way to a dense web of expectations. This brings the researcher to maneuver between two, ostensibly contradictory, research strategies: studying-up and studying-across . The paper unpacks the complexities encapsulated in these strategies by discussing methodological and ethical dilemmas in two field studies on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict conducted by the authors.