Suchergebnisse

A nationalist coalition with middle-class leadership seized control of the Bolivian state in 1952. Uprisings immediately broke out in the countryside, and peasants seized lands previously held in large estates. In response to pressure from below, the new government in 1953 initiated an agrarian reform that destroyed the economic base of the landed oligarchy. It also reorganized old agrarian institutions and created new ones to serve the rural poor. Yet government policies a short while after the revolution ceased to favor the peasantry.

Social scientists generally present the conclusions of their studies without describing how their ideas may have changed in the course of doing research. They also rarely discuss the impact they have on the persons they study or the ethical problems of research. I will address both of these issues, focusing on my experiences doing research on Mexican urban poor. In addition, I will describe how and why my conceptual framework changed during the study and raise some general questions about the relationship between theory and methods and the types of moral dilemmas faced by researchers, who often are neither value-free nor politically neutral.