Abstract
Fabio Rojas interviews urban studies scholar Mario Luis Small.
Mario Small is the Grafstein Family Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. A leading scholar in urban studies, Small has shifted his attention to a new topic—social relationships. His most recent book, Someone to Talk To, examines how people choose others for intimate and revealing conversations. Small sat down with Contexts magazine to discuss his urban studies, relationships, and being a sociologist. This interview has been edited for length.
How do cities matter in a globally connected world?
Cities are very important in a number of ways—that is easy to lose sight of. You are probably familiar with the statistic that [as of] maybe five or six years ago, for the first time ever, the majority of the world population lives in cities. We are no longer in a state of “urbanization,” where there is mass movement from the rural parts of many countries into the cities. Urbanization, at this point, is a fact of life. So, the study of society today is increasingly the study of cities.
…One thing that I would love to know or find out is [whether] to some extent, as some people have suggested, the city might start supplanting the nation-state as the most important geo-social form of organization. Clearly, in the political sense, there are many ways in which that will not be the case. But a lot of cities have basically been connecting with other cities in a way that you would have expected nation-states to connect before.
We have seen this in a number of ways. …You might recall that the president, recently, has given signals of withdrawing the country from many international agreements, including the Paris Accords. And, in fact, we withdrew from the Paris accords as I recall. And many cities within the United States made—often a political move, often a political stance—but made often a practical one to connect to other cities in deciding to enforce the expectations of our side of the Accord, regardless of what the country is doing as a whole. I think that would have been very hard to think about a generation or two ago. But now it’s essentially a fact of life. I think cities [have become the] foundations for a lot of nations’ development.
Tell me about your new book, Someone To Talk To, and about how people confide in strangers.
So the question the book answered is a pretty simple question: When people need a confidant, when they’ve experienced failure or loss, depression, illness, assault, victimization of some kind, how do they decide whom to talk to?
It’s a question that I personally find interesting; it’s a question that’s also important because talking is important. It’s very easy to think about talking as only something that’s nice to do, [but] not talking in the presence of serious strain is detrimental to health. So, one example—there was a set of breast cancer patients. These were women who had pretty severe breast cancer and would all eventually die from the cancer. And, they were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: women in the control condition simply followed the [medical] regimen as designed, whatever they had. Women in the experimental condition did the same thing, except for two things. One, I believe it was once per month, they met to talk about what they were feeling. In addition, they did a small meditation exercise together. That was it. No additional medication, no change of any other kind. As I said, they all eventually died, but the women in the experimental group lived almost twice as many months as those in the control group.
So, the question I ask is, in a context in which something is so important and, at the same time, so risky, how do people make that decision [about reaching out]? And what I found is, while pretty much people will say the same thing as that mother I interviewed back in New York who said, “Look, I talk to people I know I can trust: my spouse, my mother, my sister, my aunt, my brother, my best friend from college, et cetera.” In reality, I’ve found that, if you follow what they actually do rather than what they say they do, people are far more willing to confide deeply personal things in people they don’t know that well or who are only acquaintances, occasionally even strangers… than they tend to expect they might.
Mario Luis Small
Courtesy Tara Garcia Mathewson
What role do you think qualitative research like yours has in a world of big data?
In a world of big data, there are multiple roles for qualitative research. One is to help us figure out what to study, to give us the hypotheses to test in a big data context. A second is to tell us exactly what our big data really mean. A lot of big data are, in fact, administrative data or naturally occurring data collected by other people, by companies, or by the government for their own purposes. They are not data collected by sociologists the way surveys are collected by sociologists. As a result, the connection between their needs and our needs is not always obvious, and we need good fieldwork to establish how that connection should be made.
Think about Facebook. Now, on Facebook people have friends… and we know very well that even though Facebook calls them friends and they are connected in a network, a Facebook friend is not what many people would call, in the course of their ordinary life, a friend. In other words, we know that Facebook friends include both actual friends and then people who are just acquaintances—often, in fact, people who are just strangers. I actually don’t know everyone on my Facebook feed. Now, this is perfectly obvious because you and I and just about everybody… uses Facebook. But what about some of those other websites and some of those other big datasets that are very large and attractive to a researcher, but not collected by the researcher and for which there is no natural knowledge about the limits or the boundaries or meanings of the terms or the ideas or the connections being made on the sites? Or different kinds of data that are not network data but are used in a kind of network way—administrative data that are used in network ways? I think for all of those, we need fieldworkers or interviewers to go out and actually figure out what the data actually are.
I think a third way we need qualitative research in the context of big data is to check on the assumptions made in large-scale data analysis. For many kinds of big data research… you need simplifying assumptions. Those simplifying assumptions are often very valuable, but some [are] deeply problematic. I think, for example, the idea that strong ties are good for support and weak ties are good for information is a simplifying assumption that can be problematic in many ways. Even more, I believe that it is difficult to test any proposition that depends on context using big data. This is because all big data analyses are single-context platforms. Even if everybody in the entire world had Facebook, even if you have all that Facebook data, you only have Facebook data. You don’t know how people are interacting outside of Facebook. That’s the case with Twitter or any dataset we might use. As a result, if any aspect of what happens within Facebook is affected by what happens outside of Facebook or in some other context, you have no way of knowing. Without doing some sort of fieldwork to know if that is plausibly the case, you run the danger of making strong inferences based on single platforms because they are very large, but are not justified in a world in which, outside of the platform, people are doing things that affect what happens inside of it.
We have to be attentive to what people do, not just what they think they will do, when they’re under pressure.
While writing and researching Someone To Talk To, what did you learn about graduate students?
One of the most difficult things I learned was that many of the hardest parts of my graduate experience were not unique. Just about everybody in graduate school faces time-management problems, uncertainty about whether they are in the right place, faces some difficulty fitting in—that’s not surprising. [But] there are some deeper ones: there’s also a pervasive sense that other people were doing things important for their career that they weren’t doing. Everyone thinks that everyone else is doing better. It’s a very, very common pattern. And the thing about this pattern is that it can be extremely self-destructive, and I think it’s something that we need to fight.
[And] the extent to which financial difficulties were a big part of many people’s experiences—we tend to think about poverty as something in cities or rural America or these types of things. We don’t think about people in pursuit of PhD programs as “poor.” Even sympathetic people tend to think of graduate students as “broke,” but not as poor for the long run. And, in fact, there are many people who are broke and not poor, but there are many people who are, in fact, seriously poor. For example, who are trying to get into Medicaid for their kids or who are having difficulty figuring out where they are going to live for a long period of time. Or for whom the stipend doesn’t even begin to cover their expenses. I think that’s actually quite prominent.
Beyond that, like others, grad students are far more likely than they say they are to turn to someone who they are not close to. The reasons might be counter-intuitive, if you just begin with how we just traditionally study how networks work. It’s another reminder: we have to be attentive to what people do, not just what they think they will do, when they’re under pressure and need to reach out.