Table 1 Thematic coding analysis of objectivity interrogations and armoring.
From: Objectivity interrogation of racial scholarship in psychology and management
Themes | Codes | Prevalence (%) | Representative quotes |
|---|---|---|---|
Objectivity interrogations | |||
Disbelief | Disbelief | 20 | “I’ll say a fact and…the response is, ‘I just find that hard to believe.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, well … I’m telling you a fact’.” |
Pushback | Ideological Pushback | 61 | “White, tenured faculty would come out and say things like, ‘Oh yeah, all those people studying their own issues,’ when they were talking about people studying diversity.” |
Methodological Pushback | 43 | “One of my other lab mates, she would present qualitative work and they would come at her very critical, in a very non-constructive manner, which didn’t make sense because none of them did qualitative work. … I’m like, ‘No, that’s not how qualitative methodology works.’ ” | |
Objectivity armoring | |||
Toning down | Constraint | 53 | “Some of my more radical beliefs… they’re supported by what I’m saying, but I don’t lay it out that thickly.” |
Avoidance | 43 | “I actually really think [switching topics] helps. So sometimes I’m talking about a category that’s not threatening to the people in the room, and sometimes I’m talking about a category that is threatening.” | |
Stepping up | Overpreparation | 55 | “It helps me think ahead of time, what are the questions that I’m going to get? How can I frame this in a way that very clearly communicates the scope of my idea and the boundaries of my idea?” |
Quantification | 25 | “Folks tend to undermine the methods that people of color use or assume that they don’t know how to do certain things. I take extra care to learn those things and make sure that it’s extra clean, and make sure I always check for small errors and stuff like that. Because, I’d feel we’re more likely to get critiqued on the little things.” | |
Exacting communication | 20 | “It’s usually me spending hours … just going through the slides and getting down the wording exactly as I want it, and the intonations and inflections and my hand movements and like the dramatic pauses and all of that. So I practice that like a play. And so that’s what prepares me.” | |
