I participated in the 2022 Kent Stage "Ghost Walk" on Saturday evening. This year, instead of going around downtown Kent, or spooky spots along the Cuyahoga River, the event took place in the Wolcott Lilac Gardens, a local attraction. I had never heard of the gardens but went on a ghost walk a few years ago and heard from areas ghost hunters, so I thought I'd give this another try at a new location. The walk and stories were enjoyable although it went on a little long and got sort of cold. I thought about this a lot afterward and had vivid dreams. The next day, when I thought again about some of what I saw and heard, I realized I had encountered qualitative and quantitative approaches to ghost hunting. One approach was a quantitative, scientific (post positivist?) approach to ghost hunting which centered around use of devices and tools to measure something - ghostliness? Intensity of spirits? Other than basic presence, I'm not certain why there was a need for what looked like tools with measurement ability, but these just happened to be there and were not the focus of the ghost walk. I saw monitors, with flashing lights, trip wires, and apps that are meant to measure whatever happens in the air. According to one of the experts, the devices detect electromagnetic fields, which are all around and apparently also emitted by ghosts or spirits.
In contrast, the qualitative approach consists of empathetic mediums (I checked the internets and that is the correct form for more than one spiritual communicator) who hear and/or speak with spirits - and interpret, sometimes with little context, the intent of communication. Like survey research that measures constructs or latent variables, the ghost hunter tools cannot really, be validated by comparing to an alternative accurate measure. At least, as far as I'm aware, there is no known way to verify a ghostly presence. Also, as far as I know, while there are proxies and indicators of something like "self efficacy," there isn't a physical or stable way to prove that someone has it, like via blood draw or something else that seems pretty objective. Like qualitative interview research, communications to mediums are prone to criticisms that the medium interpreted the communication to express their own preferences, or to in some other way be beneficial to the medium, who in this instance acts as the interviewer. As has been my experience when exclusively qual and exclusively qual people get together, I sensed a little discomfort, and maybe insincerity, in the expressions of mutual respect offered by the device-based ghost hunters and the mediums. I did not see them actually work together and it might be interesting if they did so; for example I have no idea what they would do about contradictory findings. On the other hand, it seems like the device hunters might be best suited to identify whether there is a ghostly presence, and perhaps how many, and the mediums could then establish the who or why. I personally am a skeptic, and one of the reasons is that I do not see why any measured, heard, or observed presence necessarily has to reflect the spirit of a deceased individual. Why couldn't the unexplained just as easily be attributed to a time traveler or other entity moving between dimensions? So it seems to me that one of the essential problems with both the quantitative and qualitative ghost hunters is the precarious nature of the theoretical premise in the first place. And the logic appears a little circular - we believe in ghosts, which is proven by identifying things we say are ghosts, etc. Photo taken by me in the Beverly Warren Student Recreation and Wellness Center, Kent State University, with a little editing in Photos.
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AuthorI am Sheryl L. Chatfield, Ph.D, C.T.R.S. I am a member of the faculty in the College of Public Health at Kent State University. I also Co-coordinate the Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Research and I am a member of the Design Innovation Team at Kent State. Archives
February 2024
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