Carl J. Cuneo

Social Reliability in Qualitative Team Research

Much of the attention in team-based qualitative research has been on reflexivity, subjectivity, and emotionality in the relationships between researchers and subjects during data collection and analysis. There has been less emphasis on the relationships among researchers, especially the social dynamics of inter-coder agreement in what we call in this article ‘social reliability’. We explore three aspects of social reliability during team coding: explicit team knowledge, implicit team suppositions and assumptions, and explicit and implicit emotionality. Inter-coder reliability is not merely a methodological and scientific issue, but also a social one. Researchers ignore it at their peril. We suggest that researchers should endeavour to develop ways of explicitly recognizing and incorporating social reliability into their projects in order to enrich our understanding of research subjects.

Cross-cultural simulation to advance student inquiry

This article reviews how and why the authors have used the cross-cultural simulation BAFA BAFA in a 1styear social sciences inquiry course on social identity. The article discusses modifications made to Shirts’s original script for BAFA BAFA, how the authors conduct the postsimulation debriefing, key aspects of the student-written reflection of the simulation, and research results on how students perceive and rate BAFA BAFA relative to their learning. Students enrolled in the course find the simulation to be important to various aspects of their learning, including helping them to understand cultural diversity. This is particularly true for students who score highly on measures of deep learning, that is, the ability to connect course content with meanings in other situations and experiences in reflective ways.

State Mediation of Class Contradictions in Canadian Unemployment Insurance, 1930-1935

Marxist structural theorists explain the states long-term implementation of capitalist class interests, not through a direct manipulation of the state by the capitalist class, but through the states mediation of contradictions, rooted in a capitalist economy, between the working and capitalist classes. The central economic contradiction is between the forces and relations of production: the capitalist class, because of its private ownership and control of the means of production, appropriates to itself the wealth produced by the working class as surplus value in socialized production.

Comment: Restoring Class to State Unemployment Insurance

There has been a recent tendency, with deep historical roots in structural-functionalism and elite analyses, to insulate the state from class formations and struggles. Reacting against classical Marxist and neo-Marxist attempts to locate certain features of state policy in the class struggles of capitalist formations, there has been a reversion to “explaining” state policy solely by the “internal dynamics” of state administration and the motives and intentions of their incumbents. Leslie Pals critique of my work in his article is yet another attempt in this tradition. After critiquing my “narrow” use of “relative autonomy” and “rigid” reliance on “class struggle” to account for the introduction of the Employment and Social Insurance Act of 1935 and the Unemployment Insurance Act of 1940, he offers an alternative classless “model” which relies heavily on actuarial ideology and federal-provincial relations in the dynamics of internal state administration. In light of his use of my work as a point of departure, I will make only a few salient points. My comments are divided into two parts: theoretical assumptions and the class nature of actuarial ideology.

Education, Language, and Multidimensional Continentalism

In this short paper I shall seek to determine the empirical support for two hypotheses about the social sources of continentalism.