Commentary
A qualitative analysis of Pa˚l Kraft
Johan Edman
Stockholm University, Sweden
Keywords
causal explanatory research, historical research, quantitative versus qualitative research, research funding, social science alcohol and drug research
Judging from an interview with Pa˚l Kraft (Mei- singset, 2016), social science alcohol and drug research is a very narrow field. In fact, it is downsized beyond recognition, with no trace of its usual multidisciplinary characteristics or some important areas, such as policy studies, philosophical and sociological conceptual ana- lyses, historical studies on problem definitions, or the development and comparison of treat- ment and control systems. What remains is psy- chological or medical causal explanatory research, a context-free remnant of what we typically mean by (Nordic) social science alco- hol and drug research.
It may be this lack of context – accurately described by Matilda Hellman (2017) as a
“science fictional eagerness” – that enables Kraft to position his scientific dreaming as a fresh and promising approach in contrast to the hopelessly dated qualitative alcohol and drug research. But seen from a wider and more gen- eral perspective, progress is less prominent
than Kraft claims. The developments of alcohol and drug problems over the last 200 years, dominant problem descriptions and public responses have been thoroughly examined.
This research has usually been conducted through document and archive studies where, for example, text analysis and systematic criti- cism of the sources are much more relevant instruments than EEG or “eye tracking”. These studies also show us how scientific dreams of progress regularly take root, full of confidence and without any sense of history. Repeatedly these dreams bloom and wither – and then recur.
Common to these efforts, whether we speak of the late 1800s degeneration hypothesis or the alcoholism movement of the mid-1900s, is a very selective problem description of narrow phenomena beyond context, time and space.
Ever-changing etiological explanations are born and forgotten; such methods as aversion therapy, applied eugenics or vitamin injections
Submitted: 23 March 2017; accepted: 24 March 2017 Corresponding author:
Johan Edman, Centre for Social Research on Alcohol and Drugs (SoRAD), Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden.
Email: johan.edman@sorad.su.se
Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs 2017, Vol. 34(3) 196–197 ªThe Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permission:
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have all had their (scientifically motivated) heyday. This is the insight that can be learnt from qualitative social science alcohol and drug research.
We also learn that dominant descriptions of misuse problems, popular policy measures and influential research change for many different reasons, and not always as a result of unequi- vocal scientific progress. For example, alcohol prohibition reforms in several Western coun- tries (including Norway) in the early 1900s were not research-based, nor was the introduc- tion of the ration book in Sweden in the 1910s, or its abolition in the 1950s. Yet, these drastic alcohol policy reforms were partially motivated by research arguments. Then as now, there is a thin line between evidence-based policy and policy-based evidence.
This also applies to research councils steer- ing through selective funding, an aspect of research policy that we are to investigate in a new Swedish project (generously funded by several Swedish research councils). If we were to conduct this study in Norway, analysing why some alcohol and drug research has been granted much more funding than other research, our investigations would perhaps lead us to the interview with Pa˚l Kraft. Perhaps our contem- plation would involve the observation that one of Norway’s most influential stakeholders in
the research field has justified this process in a multi-step argument: first by narrowing the description of social science alcohol and drug research to a very limited field (clinical prob- lem solving); then by giving an even narrower description of qualitative methods (“ask people about their thoughts, feelings and opinions”);
and finally by making some vague and unsub- stantiated allegations about how social and cul- tural patterns also could be examined with
“more advanced technology”.
What remains is a very narrow research question regarding causes of disease. Only at this stage will the argument – that quantitative research on “big data” is preferable – become scientifically valid and relevant. Even if Pa˚l Kraft were right about this, the road to this con- clusion has in each previous step been strategic and ideological, not scientifically justified.
And, to quote Pa˚l Kraft, “the choice of method is not an ideological issue” (Meisingset, 2016, p. 22). Well, it shouldn’t be.
References
Hellman, M. (2017). Scientific progress: The role of innovative qualitative inquiries. Nordic Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, 34. doi: 10.1177/145507 2517709851
Meisingset, K. (2016). Rusforskning: Big-data og genetikk. Rus & Samfunn, 9(6), 20–22.
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