A researcher surveyed our village. Why does it matter what we meant by our answers?

Question

I grow cocoa in the Ashanti Region. Last year a research team came with tablets and asked everyone the same questions. How many hours a day do you work? Do you trust your neighbours? How much land do you own?
The questions were polite, but our answers did not mean what they seemed to mean. "Work" for us includes days spent on a neighbour's farm in exchange for help on ours. "Own" is a hard word when the land belongs to the family and the stool. "Trust" depends on which neighbour.
My nephew studies at the university in Kumasi. When I complained, he said the researchers had a problem a German called Weber wrote about, something called Verstehen, and that some people think social science must understand what people mean, not only count what they do.
Can someone explain this properly? What is the difference between understanding people and explaining them? And if the researchers counted our answers without knowing what we meant, is their study wrong, or only incomplete?

Johanna Reinhardt · Accepted Answer

Your nephew is right, and your examples are better than most textbook ones.
Max Weber defined sociology as the science that seeks to understand social action interpretively and thereby to explain it causally. "Action", for him, is behaviour to which the person attaches a meaning. Walking to a neighbour's farm is just movement; doing it as repayment of help is an action. To explain why people do it, you have to grasp that meaning. That is Verstehen, interpretive understanding.
Weber did not think understanding replaced causal explanation. He wanted both: grasp the meaning, then test whether it actually explains what people do.
Compare Émile Durkheim, who told sociologists to treat "social facts as things", studied from outside like objects in nature. Counting hours is very Durkheimian. Later, Peter Winch went further than Weber: social life is governed by rules, so understanding it is mainly conceptual, like understanding a language.
So is the study wrong? If "hours of work" meant different things to different people, the numbers add up things that are not the same kind of thing. The arithmetic is fine; what was counted is unclear. I'd call that worse than incomplete. The study answers a question nobody in your village was asked.

Kwame Asante · Answer

Akosua, what you describe has a name in Twi farming life, and researchers should learn it before they design a survey: the rotating group labour many communities use, nnoboa. If the questionnaire has no category for it, your work in such a group disappears or gets miscounted. Kwasi Wiredu spent much of his career arguing that concepts must be checked in the language people actually think in before they are compared or counted. Your survey is a small case of his big point.

Akosua Mensah · Answer

Thank you both. "The arithmetic is fine; what was counted is unclear" is exactly what I wanted to say to them. Next time they come I will ask them to sit with us for a week before they ask anything.

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