Metodfrågor i ungdomskulturforskningen

This is the first of a series of reports from the research program Youth culture in Sweden, FUS. It contains five texts on methodological issues, three written by the members of the FUS central group that edits this series, and two by other researchers who participate in the network of the program. The first article, by the youth culture researcher and program initiator Johan Fornäs from Stockholm, discusses some theoretical, empirical, methodological and organizational aspects of interdisciplinary and comparative cultural studies, and argues for a polydimensional ”art of thinking more than one thing at a time”. The sociologist Magdalena Czaplicka from Uppsala dives into the problems of designing and interpreting quantitative data, especially with respect to the dimension of time, while the media researcher Keith Roe from Göteborg treats the problem of validity in both quantitative and qualitative studies. Sabina Cwejman, a sociologist in Göteborg, sums up the qualitative tradition within social sciences. Ulf Boëthius, a literary researcher in Stockholm and like Cwejman and Fornäs member of the FUS central group, finally gives an overview over some general turning points and tendencies in the humanities during the last decades, from positivism in the 60s, over marxism, structuralism and hermeneutics in the 70s, up to the ambivalent postmodern and deconstructionist break with totalities in the 80s