All right, finished most of the paper. A few responses to @JHS, out of respect for his earlier efforts and perseverance:
“The paper is a awkward mixture of legal history, social psychology, opinion research, and models of conflict resolution used in mediation.”
- Yes, this is a mixture. He used a combination of humanistic and social science approaches in order to explore the topic. While I haven't read anything else out of CHD, I got the impression that this kind of interdisciplinary work is consistent with that department. However, it could also be the case that "higher quality" papers will incorporate some primary method - say, sociologoical - perhaps with a bit of icing representing other approaches. The author didn't take that approach. His work was divided into neat chapters detailing each method. Not "awkward", in my view, but that's an understandable description. He should have had transitional sections to explain why each method was important. While he lays out his methods in one of the beginning chapters, that's a couple hundred pages back and he needed to be more clear on why he was using each one, rather than merely stating that his training at UChicago and NU gave him the skills and opportunity to conduct mediation analyses.
“It also purports to demonstrate use of the “SAGE” approach to qualitative social science research for mediation. Honestly, that felt like a suck-up to his advisor and committee rather than something he actually cared about. If it were convincing, it would probably be the most original part of the thesis, but . . . not so much. (What, exactly, the SAGE approach to qualitative social science research is proved to be too jargony and boring to sustain even my desperate procastinatory interest.)”
- I don't get this comment. SAGE was incorporated as part of the social science section, and was something his own department originated, as the author explains. This paper depends on methods of mediation so if he didn't use SAGE he would have needed to use something else, right? Also, the "jargony" paper was an academic work noted in the footnotes. It was NOT a long-winded explanation detailed in the author's work. The author does SUMMARIZE how SAGE works in a couple of double-spaced footnoted pages. Plenty of opportunity for the lay-reader to pick up a general understanding. This reminded me of focus on the CRSP data set at Booth, which provided a ton of new and ground-breaking research by Fama and many others, and was highlighted in many a finance paper that I read while there.
“The mediation aspect is really simplistic, and amounts to “There’s really lots that most people agree about, and there could be a reasonably stable solution if only politicians were willing to find the majority rather than cater to the activists in their respective parties.” Yes, we knew that already, I think. And we also know that our political system really isn’t built that way.”
- The "mediation aspect" was the entire point of the paper LOL. Obviously, people can disagree about the relevance of mediation as an effective method or whether the author used mediation methodology correctly. Not well versed in that so can't say much. But there is a difference between "Well, we ALL know THAT" and a formalized confirmation or refutation of whether that statement is actually accurate. Generalizing that clarification, that's why there is research into anything. Since the purpose of the paper was to clarify and move the debate forward, that was deemed by the author to be a necessary step. Hence his dissertation.
Additional observations:
- Certainly do think that with a topic like this, it's possible to read through and emerge with prior biases not moving an inch, finding it irrelevant (from either side of the debate), etc. Any honest academic will also build on his/her work and that includes fixing mistakes etc. (Like what Levitt did when it was pointed out that his Abortion Lowers Crime research had some mistakes). Research isn't "the answer" to a LOT of issues. It merely opens the door to more questions.
- My own take on the Group Mediation chapter was that he should have used a much more broad group of subjects. Hyde Park - not to mention Chicago itself! - is filled with people from all walks of life. Including some single moms or older residents of the community would have spiced things up and perhaps could have enabled the author to include the results more substantively. Or perhaps he could have done several rounds of mediation using randomly selected subjects. Relying on college kids from two elite institutions - even if they have different views - is relying on a rather homogenous group. Unless the author meant to control for some factors like education level. If so, I missed that section of the paper.
- On the idea of "mediation" becoming an interdisciplinary branch of social science research - novel (to me at least). JHS might be better clued in since this involves some legal training as well as social science training. I do thing there is something to this approach that mere polls can't capture. Thinking we might have some interesting results to the pressing political questions of the day using this approach.
- Finally, a huge bug-a-boo: Fix Your Typos, Dr. Jacobs, PLEASE. They were totally distracting and I fail to see how a dissertation can get through committee with so many of them. PhD students used to have to run their theses through an editor for format style and grammar and so forth. Does that not happen anymore? Or does this version precede the final-FINAL?