Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Be Wary of Generalizing Based on Your Experiences

In development, as in any other sphere of life, it is important to remember that your experiences are not necessarily indicative of over-arching themes. In fact, most of the time, your experience in a particular village one year is not even indicative of that village's broader situation. It is just the experience you had, which you hopefully have learned from, but do not attempt to extrapolate too much from it.

Duncan Green covered this while reviewing the book Delivering Development. To open his review, he references another book*, Whose Reality Counts, to note how most development professionals "'gain direct field experience only early in a career if at all,’" and Green uses this to say the following:
One feature of that path is that the year-in-the-village shapes each person’s thinking for the rest of their careers, acquiring a special claim to truth, even if research and data suggests that in some areas, that experience may not be typical. Discussions often end up in ‘well, when I was living in Malawi….’ as though that is the final word on the matter.
Too often, this sort of generalization based on one's own experience becomes canon. I have certainly been guilty of this, although I try to qualify my comments on my experience with lines like, "where I lived in Madagascar" or "from my limited experience in small villages along the eastern rain forest in Madagascar." Such lines get clunky, though, and it is easier to generalize. Just ask Thomas Friedman or Nicholas Kristof ("My taxi driver had an ipod AND a cell phone; this country is developed!"). But it is important that we all strive to not take the easy way out, and instead work towards accurate statements based on wide studies and experiences. Indeed, it is critical (in my mind) that development professionals strive to get into the field as frequently as possible. They should also aim to live in rural villages at different points in their careers, in order to maintain perspective on their work while simultaneously breaking out of the image of development workers driving a convoy of land crusiers from one walled compound to another. Such aims may be difficult, but if development workers at least begin with maintaining perspective and avoiding generalizations, it would be a step in the right direction!



* I have not read either book, but I think both sound interesting and hope to get to them... some day...

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