The more time I spend doing this work, the more I find myself thinking about issues of content and form. How you say something is often more important (or is at least equally important) to what you are saying. Or rather, how you think about/quantify something is equal to what you are quantifying. Maybe an example will clarify:
The other day, we were discussing a survey. The survey essentially measures the poverty level of the individuals we work with. One of the questions on the survey asks "Do you have a bath shelter?" It seems like a simple question. You would presumably either have one, or not. But then we got to talking about bath shelters. Some people make bath shelters out of sticks, others make them out of sacks and cardboard. Others use concrete, or metal sheets. It turns out we were not just looking for any old bath shelter. We wanted to count only concrete or iron sheet bath shelters as bath shelters, those that demonstrated the individual had made a concerted, conscious purchase: this money will be used to build a serious bath shelter. I started thinking; how then, were we to interpret the other bath shelters? A bath shelter made of "cast offs," (in our survey) implies the absence of conscious monetary investment. But what if that "cast off" bath shelter represented the use of money on another investment? What if the individual valued, say, a latrine or a mosquito net, more than a bath shelter? (And the fact that not everyone has a "cast off" shelter implies that it still costs something to build one...) A lack of investment in a permanent bath shelter could mean other investments (in money or time) elsewhere...
and then my head exploded, and I was left holding a spent stick of dynamite like Wile E. Coyote, singed beyond recognition: Every statistic EVER became multi-dimensional: a lack of something could be interpreted to mean an alternative investment/valuing of something else. You could tell a multitude of stories by purposefully interpreting a single measurement. How, then, is there ever any certainty? Or objectivity? Or truth? How can you hope to convey a remotely complete picture of anything when even absence can speak volumes?
Which brings me to the photo. Whose significance I hadn't understood until now:
Prostitution Strictly Not Allowed is one thing. Strictly Prostitution Not Allowed is totally different. Prostitution and Eating? Fine. Prostitution and Dancing? No problem. Strictly Prostitution and nothing else? Absolutely not.
It was sort of the same as the bath shelters. Context/wording/emphasis completely altered meaning, presenting (at minimum) two very different realities: We count all bath shelters as bath shelters, which provides us with one set of data, or we count only some bath shelters as bath shelters, possibly ignoring an important choice that people make regarding which kind of bath shelter they want, which ultimately results in less bath shelters in among our participants...which makes them poorer, which then influences how we work with them...
Wile E. Coyote, man.
