How to Solve the Rashomon Effect | Radical Subjectivity in Qualitative Research

What do social scientists do when their informants lie or give them contradictory information? In this episode of Off the Shelf we answer that question and explain how you can constructively incorporate conflicting interviews (and even outright lies) into your qualitative research. And to do that we're going to discuss one of our favorite films of all time, Akira Kurosawa's 1950 masterpiece, Rashomon.

The host, Alexander K. Smith, holds a PhD from the University of Paris in the Anthropology of Tibet and the Himalayas and an MA from Oxford University.

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[1] The term Rashomon Effect is most often used in a general sense to refer to the co-existence of contradictory point of view testimonies that describe the same event from multiple perspectives; however, for the purposes-of-this video, I'm working off of Davis, Anderson, and Walls's excellent book "Rashomon Effects: Kurosawa, Rashomon, and their Legacies", which extends the concept to a more methodologically grounded social scientific context that includes the ways in which The Rashomon Effect influences scientific observers and potentially corrupts their data.

Works Cited:

Bernard, Killworth, Kronefeld, and Sailer. 1984. "The Problem of Informant Accuracy: The validity of Retrospective Data" in Annual Review of Anthropology 13, pp. 495-517.

Davis, Anderson, and Walls (eds.). 2015. "Rashomon Effects: Kurosawa, Rashomon and their Legacies. London and New York: Routledge.

Monahan, Torin and Fisher, Jill A. 2010. "Benefits of 'Observer Effects': Lessons from the Field in Qualitative Research 10(3), pp. 357-376.

0:00 Introduction
1:46 Plot Summary
4:12 The Rashomon Effect in Social Science
5:40 How to Solve the Rashomon Effect
7:17 Reading Rashomon like a Social Scientist
9:25 The Goals of Qualitative Research
10:03 Conclusion