Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

170 P. Smeyers
are steps (a plan as in a script), there are procedures to be followed (to ascertain that
the obtained evidence will be acceptable in a court of law which necessitates search
warrants) and evidently, if the investigator is in one way or another herself related or
otherwise involved, she cannot be part of the investigating team (it may jeopardize
her objectivity or even corrupt the investigation).
Of course that does not mean that the above is not relevant if a different approach
is taken, but crime stories which focus on historical circumstances (the past) and
characters approach the problems to be resolved somewhat differently. Physical evidence
remains important. But the way to gather it and the ways in which sense is
made of what is found are somewhat different. For instance, by employing a profiler,
‘Waking the Dead’ holds in some sense a middle ground between the rather impressionistic
approach of Morse (who often gets it wrong) and the almost exclusive
attention given to physical evidence by Horatio Caine in CSI. An example of this
middle ground can be found for instance in ‘Deathwatch’ episode 2 of the second
season. When trying to identify a person investigators combine different sorts of
evidence. The individual suffered from emphysema (asbestosis) and had been in the
military. These factors, taken together with other elements, meant that investigators
decided to search for someone who has worked in confined spaces, perhaps an engineer
or a submariner. In the same episode a clue is given to the audience when the
executioner (Truelove) says ‘I always thought of the police as my colleagues and
now what do you make me think of them’. The audience are alerted to police corruption
and that they should look there to understand what happened in the past (the
hanging of an innocent man) and a more recent murder. 2
Statistics I argued are attractive because they inform us about how things are and
how they work. Crime stories of the first kind create suspense by postponing the
answer to the question ‘who committed the crime’; crime stories of the second type
are doing much more, i.e. they open up the complexity that is involved, yet they too
have a plot and a ‘solution’. They would not be (so) attractive if these things were
left out. Indeed, if they were left out, we might say that the show belonged to a different
genre. Anyway stories of the second type are not only concerned with ‘why’
but also ‘how’. Would we criticize someone for being interested in ‘who did it’?
Would this be legitimate? If so, why not make an analogy with the enthusiasm for
statistics? The same element presses itself forward. Some people are only interested,
so it would seem, in simple answers (to complex things). Maybe they do not want
to live with complexity. Do we really have an argument against seeing things in this
way, or is it really only a matter of taste (defined as preferring cola to lemonade
everything else being equal)?
Incidentally I am not trying to draw a parallel with the conceptual element present
in a theoretical research approach (in the sense of a logic of discovery) that is supposed
to be operative in educational research. The parallel I am interested in is about
‘how something works’ and ‘who committed the crime’. In comparing the two types
of crime stories I am trying to make the point that the approach of the CSI-kind is
limited and that the Morse-type is much broader. By the same token, in some cases
physical evidence can be decisive. Studying causal interactions may explain what is
happening in a particular case and reasons beyond a more minimal conceptual level