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Condemned to be meaningful: Non‐response in studies of men and infertility
Author(s) -
Lloyd Mike
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
sociology of health and illness
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.146
H-Index - 97
eISSN - 1467-9566
pISSN - 0141-9889
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9566.ep10939057
Subject(s) - infertility , interpretation (philosophy) , psychology , male infertility , epistemology , process (computing) , social psychology , developmental psychology , computer science , philosophy , pregnancy , biology , linguistics , genetics , operating system
Male infertility has been under‐researched, and in part this seems due to a strong reticence by men to talk to researchers about infertility. Rather than suggest possible features of male infertility that might lead to this reticence, this paper explores how researchers have themselves accounted for the high non‐ response rates. The analysis details the way in which social scientific reasoning about non‐response incorporates both existing knowledge about infertility and everyday reasoning about health and illness. It is suggested that this process is a variant of a pervasive form of commonsense reasoning ‐ the documentary method of interpretation. The interesting upshot of applying this method to non‐response, is that an absence of information is ‘condemned to be meaningful’.