Underemployment: social fact or socially constructed reality?

摘要

This paper contrasts rural underemployment in the USA as a social fact with rural underemployment as a socially constructed reality. Using both survey data and in-depth interviews with 33 persistently underemployed rural residents in North Dakota, USA, the study was able to determine whether the researchers were imposing their definition of reality on the interviewees. The data from the interviews largely demonstrated a correspondence between the researchers' objective definition of reality as defined by measures of underemployment and the informants' subjective interpretation of their employment situation. This procedure demonstrated that the underemployed had created their own subjective reality, which had become an objective reality: a sociallycreated fact. A few cases, however, raised concerns about the extent to which that reality was widely shared because the interviewees' definitions did not correspond to the researchers' objective definitions or did not make sense in their own situations. Other interviewees' comments raised significant questions about the applicability of formal labour market concepts and measures, which tend to overlook the unique characteristics of rural labour markets such as uncompensated labour, self-employment, and multiple job holding. Thus the in-depth interviews provided conceptual checks on the extent to which researchers can impose their definitions of the situation on respondents' subjective reality.