First Love: A Case Study in Quantitative Appropriation of Social Concepts

The Qualitative Report Volume 13 | Number 2 Article 4 6-1-2008 First Love: A Case Study in Quantitative Appropriation of Social Concepts Diederik F. Janssen Independent Researcher, Follow this and additional works at: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr Part of the Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies Commons, and the Social Statistics Commons Recommended APA Citation Janssen, D. F. (2008). First Love: A Case Study in Quantitative Appropriation of Social Concepts . The Qualitative Report, 13(2), 178-203. Retrieved from https://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr/vol13/iss2/4 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the The Qualitative Report at NSUWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Qualitative Report by an authorized administrator of NSUWorks. For more information, please contact . First Love: A Case Study in Quantitative Appropriation of Social Concepts Abstract Peer love is a highly invested autobiographical marker, and its scientific ascent can be studied in terms of its literature’s motives, stated objectives, exclusions, and delimitations. In this article an overview of numeric and selected ethnographic data on the timing of “first love” is presented, to inform an assessment of the ontological underpinnings of milestone research common to quantitative sociology and developmental psychology. Complicating scientific normalization of love’s initiatory connotation, selected ethnographic observations on the timing and notion of early/first love in non-Western societies are presented. These observations facilitate a critique of love as a heterosocial, propaedeutic event, and hence, as scientifically accessible and befitting the routines and metaphors of biomedical “milestone monitoring.” Keywords Age of First Love, First Crush, Critique of Quantitative Methods, Ethnography, Literature Review, and Adolescence Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License. Acknowledgements Diederik F. Janssen wishes to thank Dr. Richard Alapack, Dr. Beate Schwarz, and Dr. Rainer Silbereisen for their kind communication. He would also like to thank the Qualitative Report board for providing what has been a truly helpful context for developing this paper. This article is available in The Qualitative Report: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr/vol13/iss2/4 The Qualitative Report Volume 13 Number 2 June 2008 178-203 http://www.nova.edu/ssss/QR/QR13-2/janssen.pdf First Love: A Case Study in Quantitative Appropriation of Social Concepts Diederik F. Janssen Independent Researcher, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Peer love is a highly invested autobiographical marker, and its scientific ascent can be studied in terms of its literature’s motives, stated objectives, exclusions, and delimitations. In this article an overview of numeric and selected ethnographic data on the timing of “first love” is presented, to inform an assessment of the ontological underpinnings of milestone research common to quantitative sociology and developmental psychology. Complicating scientific normalization of love’s initiatory connotation, selected ethnographic observations on the timing and notion of early/first love in non-Western societies are presented. These observations facilitate a critique of love as a heterosocial, propaedeutic event, and hence, as scientifically accessible and befitting the routines and metaphors of biomedical “milestone monitoring.” Key Words: Age of First Love, First Crush, Critique of Quantitative Methods, Ethnography, Literature Review, and Adolescence My sister comes in. Her eyes are full of sorrow. She sings to me, “When the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls, someone thinks of me…” I doze, thinking of plums, walls, and “someone.” (Morrison, 1970, p. 7) Studying love, not in the least its first occurrences, constitutes an interesting phenomenological oxymoron. Who would ever need to define, delimit, its enchanting appeal, its poetic necessity, its humanizing agency? Moreover, who could ever “measure” its occurrences, render it commensurable? A range of approaches to love-related phenomena does allow an analysis of Western love’s discursive association to its timing as normal, appropriate, or possible: psychoanalysis, human ethology, ethnology, psychoneuroendocrinology, symbolic interactionism, linguistics, and social constructionism (Janssen, 2003, II, ch. 15). In this paper I propose a critique of the exacting science of “first love,” arguing that this informs a more general critique of the milestone trope in developmental studies. My objections can be formulated as follows. First, chronometric approaches by definition propose to neutralize the highly idiosyncratic status culturally reserved for mental states per se and for highly invested autobiographical markers more specifically, and (thus) these approaches seem to antagonize (or in fact ignore) the widely recognized charisma and humanizing properties of “personal” milestones in Western developmental theory. “First love” arguably qualifies triply here. 179 The Qualitative Report June 2008 Second, the motivated, occasioned nature of research may be obscured by implicit or explicit claims to objectivity. This may entail, as will be suggested below, the tacit introduction of exclusions, centric operationalizations, and a reductive evaluation of scientific salience. Lastly, the quantitative paradigm fails to address any existing developmental, ethnographic, ethnolinguistic, and discursive ambiguities of love, as well as of the eventual connotation of its “first occurrence.” In other words, it fails to address the process and performance of biography, in which, for instance, psychological states are “worked up” as salient events and as markers of existential or social “growth,” “ascent,” or “development.” Clearly being-in-love is not as unproblematically eventful as a (first) kiss (Regan, Shen, de la Peña, & Gosset, 2007). Thus, quantification may paradoxically render problematic any attempt to compare the “timing” of personal events, at least as studied through diverse research schemes. My objections, then, take issue with the commonly made distinction of qualitative findings and quantitative data or givens, and the proposition that the former may supplement, “broaden the evidence base” of (e.g., Barbour, 2000), or ideally be “incorporated” (Pearson, 2004) in, quantitative overviews. Qualitative research may, more radically, suggest that research results are neither simply found (encountered) or given (collected), more specifically that quantitative aggregation of results as such entails the methodological proposition or tacit acceptance or assumption of conventional ways of representation. Representation is left out of the analysis. That is to say; what is being pinpointed in time may be crucially entangled with the act (in research contexts we must say: occasion, or better: occasioning) of the pinpo (...truncated)