heh. there's a story i was told, but i never found out if it was true. i believe it was published. Anyway, a woman went to do follow up research on, I think it was the sociological classic _Street Corner Society_. She'd gone to the same university where the research started and planned to study the same corner. It was in that genre anyway: the urban studies, community studies that came out of the Chicago School.
For some reason though, the men on this corner didn't appreciate her approach so they decided to mess with her, making stuff up, etc. They felt she was just another university trained asshole there to mess with their lives and treat them like animals in a zoo, so they 'fought' back.
Like I said, it was just a story told me by a mentor, a sociologist, who sometimes didn't have a lot of respect for other sociologists. One day before he passed away, for instance, he told me just to finish up the dissertation (he was an outside reader from another university on my committee) by making shit up because no one would ever know. I was horrified at the thought, but couldn't help laughing because the apocryphal story for any grad student is one where someone writes the diss, turns it in but with a page from a porn magazine tucked in at the end. No one notices. Apocryphal stories like that circulate, suggesting that no one reads your work anyway, so why do you bust your ass on the damn thing since everyone knows that pretty much the only people who will breath on it are your committee.
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org (NSFW)