Social and Behavioral Research in Latin America Research Paper

1. Graduate Training

The Latin American tradition of tertiary studies opens the door to regulated professions after five years of study and, despite the fact that courses with nonprofessional titles have arisen in the various social fields, the association with university education historically has been quite clear. The social, legal, communication, and behavioral sciences are clearly in the majority (29.2 percent of enrolments). If we include in them economics and administration, their proportion rises to 41.3 percent. The group that results from adding together educational disciplines and the humanities represents 18 percent of the total enrolment which, added to the above-mentioned disciplines, gives a figure of 60 percent of higher-education student population devoted to sociocultural and educational disciplines.

The range of courses in the social field is not homogeneous either between countries in the region or within one and the same country. Within a motley and variegated picture of the social science field, the main systems producing the greatest numbers of graduates with first degrees are those of Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. The social and human sciences take the lion’s share of enrolment in all higher-education systems, including those of Latin America, for the simple reason that professional activities requiring language proficiency and general knowledge about society and the contemporary world are much more numerous than those requiring specialized and technical knowledge. Adding all the disciplines related to the social field they total half a million graduates, or 62 percent of the total graduate population from higher education.

Two main groups of social science courses may be distinguished. The first one is oriented to the employment market (basically for people who already work or who seek a secondary-school position and/or general training). The second, much smaller, comprises the traditional more academically oriented disciplines.

1.1 Market-Oriented Courses

Expansion of higher education, especially from the 1970s on, swelled the number of students in the social sciences and the humanities, who were recruited largely from those who had been unsuccessful in applying for more prestigious courses. Such students seek an ill-defined professionalization that the university is unable to supply in satisfactory measure, since it requires much more structured supervision than the university is prepared to offer. The majority of students enroll in courses with high drop-out rates and conferring dubious professional status and are from social backgrounds manifestly less privileged than those seeking to enter more competitive social professions. Thousands of students enter higher education inadequately educated and enroll in private institutions which pay the teachers badly or do not provide the minimum working conditions needed, or in the ‘difficult’ mass departments of public universities. The climate of lack of motivation prevailing in such departments and schools explains why many teachers who wish to do research seek refuge in postgraduate work.

Curricula for the market-oriented courses—administration, social service, law, teaching, communication, and others—have often been weak at both undergraduate and postgraduate level because, being based on extremely pragmatic educational schemes, they have virtually no academic or disciplinary traditions of their own. They are like hybrids unable to reproduce, despite the efforts they often make to copy the academic rituals of the more established disciplines (congresses, specialist journals, research projects, postgraduate programs, etc.). Professional training in the social sciences is a difficult and controversial issue. New social demands imply changes in the definition of the problems to be considered. One way to proceed might be to include the subjects of applied courses in the central work agenda of the most highly qualified social scientists, thus expanding their range of subjects and their involvement in topics normally considered to lie outside their specialty. This is not an exclusively Latin American problem, though. The available evidence shows that two very different types of teacher co-exist in the most successful market-oriented courses: persons from the world of production, business, or services proper who, as part of consultancy activities, move between the academic sector and those other sectors and who convey to the students the practical and applied meaning of their occupations, and academic social scientists responsible for research and for ensuring the academic and intellectual quality of the courses (Schwartzman 1997).

In general, the field of the social professions is being taken over by administration, economics, and law, and by various administrative courses peculiar to the technical sector, such as industrial engineering, with little remaining for the traditional social science faculties. Taking into account that social science courses are among the most inefficient in terms of numbers of graduates compared with enrolled students, and concentrating here only on enrolment figures to give an idea of the size of the population involved, it may be observed that among the 10 most popular degree-level courses in Mexico, that of chartered accountant took first place in 1996 (34,653 enrolled students), followed by law (20,983 students) and administration (20,523 students). Medicine came fourth with 8,609 students. In absolute terms, administration, law, teaching, and arts courses in Brazil in 1997 each have more than 100,000 registered students, constituting a third of the total number of enrolments for higher courses (administrative courses have the highest enrolment of all, with 160,000 students, followed by law; engineering occupies third place with 130,000, and accountancy and economics come sixth and seventh with 89,000 and 68,000 students, respectively). In Argentina, the courses with the greatest number of registered students in the public universities in 1994 were law, with 82,896 registered students, psychology with 23,446, social communication with 11,741, and economics with 4,524. The private universities accounted for the highest number of students registered for courses in administration and economic sciences: 38,801 students; law, political science, and diplomacy 26,386, and other social sciences 12,624, with a grand total of 77,811 enrolled students (62.4 percent of total enrolments in the private universities, not counting another 12.3 percent for the humanities).

1.2 The Traditional Academic Courses

The social sciences in the stricter or more ‘academic’ sense, including sociology, anthropology, and political science, are taught in smaller departments or schools and involve small groups. As they are related more closely to research and postgraduate activity, they are referred to under these headings. The more traditional social disciplines, history and geography, expanded from the 1940s onwards in countries like Brazil, in order to meet the needs of secondary teaching, in accordance with a French tradition that proved impossible to revive before it was overtaken by the dramatic deterioration suffered by secondary education in the region. The profession of secondary-school teacher gradually lost its luster, in the overall crisis that overwhelmed that level of study. However, history and geography renewed themselves in several countries and produced valuable modern professionals and research schools.

The most recent quantitative surveys of the social sciences report certain common symptoms in the region which indicate a certain stagnation on the part of the traditional social disciplines: a drop in enrolments, cancellation of research programs and units in the public sector, a greater uncertainty among students of these subjects about their professional future, a growing reduction in suitably attractive economic opportunities for research and teaching, and a wide variety of problems at educational establishments, inter alia, form part of the fluctuating fortunes of the social disciplines. Paradoxically, however, most study plans, regardless of the level concerned, place the emphasis on a professional profile with a bias towards research. While there are greater differences within the public and private sectors than between individual institutions belonging to each of the two sectors, public institutions appear to place greater emphasis on research-oriented training, although this is invariably a very small part of academic activity.

1.3 Teachers’ Recruitment

The recruitment of academics in higher-education institutions in the social and administrative sciences increased most between 1970 and 1992, when it acquired its greatest ascendancy. The mass explosion in tertiary-level enrolments was such that these academics were for the most part absorbed into university life. The absorption rate in Mexico was as follows: 56.5 percent were recruited into teaching positions as soon as they finished their first-degree studies or even without getting a degree (35.4 percent), only 2 percent having a doctorate and 4.3 percent a master’s degree, and without teaching experience (60.5 percent), without having practiced their profession (30.4 percent) or without any research experience in research (91.8 percent) (Gil et al. 1994). In the early 1990s 60.8 percent of academics still only had a first degree and 13.5 percent a specialization diploma. At the other extreme were the natural and exact sciences, with 54.4 percent doctor’s and master’s degree holders. The academic training levels of university personnel rose strongly in most countries during the late 1990s, as a result of conscious efforts by national authorities. However, not always the postgraduate studies in which they engaged themselves to improve their qualifications culminated successfully.

Data on developments in the teaching profession in Argentina suggest that its composition there and in certain other countries (like Mexico) suffers from structural problems, such as the very small proportion of full-time contracts compared with the total. Only 4.5 percent were full-time and 19 percent half-time by mid-1990s. The rest (76.5 percent) were part-time, contrasting with the basic and technological sciences where the picture was mainly one of full-time and halftime teaching. In other countries, such as Brazil and Venezuela, efforts have been made to introduce fulltime teaching in universities, although in the latter, deteriorated work conditions in public universities in the 1980s and 1990s have resulted in a lower number of full-time positions and an insufficient replenishment rate of posts vacated by retiring staff.

2. Postgraduate Courses

Demands for credentials of formal academic training have risen significantly. People often go in for postgraduate courses in order to improve their skills and/or obtain higher qualifications that will confer formal institutional recognition on their ongoing academic careers. Yet it is clear that the postgraduate phase is not exclusively synonymous with a high level of research but can also mean greater professionalization. Despite the stated expectations and aspirations of master’s and doctorate programs as channels contributing to raise the research capabilities, the training of researchers is limited because these programs appear in many cases to remain fundamentally divorced from research activity. Researchers and the institutions where they work often experience great difficulty in linking research and teaching, owing to the existence of rigid institutional thinking. In many institutional contexts in Latin America, research and education are juxtaposed rather than integrated activities.

In Brazil, for some decades, postgraduate courses in social sciences were developed around the master’s degree, which assumed great importance and became a sort of mini-doctorate until full doctorates began to be introduced much later (Durham 1991). Government policy was already recommending in 1965 that a research doctorate should be distinguished from a professional doctorate, with the same distinction being applied to master’s degrees. Failure to observe that recommendation caused serious difficulties in the different fields. Despite the regulatory intention behind initial government planning, the growth in postgraduate courses in the 1970s went out of control. There were too few qualified lecturers, postgraduate courses were introduced in already saturated regions, programs requiring little investment proliferated and an expansion exceeding the human and financial resources available occurred. More recently, CAPES (Coordination of Advanced Training for Higher-level Personnel) has been performing a useful task of monitoring and evaluating postgraduate courses, thus helping to raise and homogenize quality standards of performance. In 1997 it accredited the following courses in the social field: in the applied social sciences, including law, administration, economics, architecture and town planning, land-use planning, demography, information science, communication, social service, and industrial design, a total of 143 courses between 104 master’s degrees and 39 doctorates; in the human sciences 178 master’s degrees and 87 doctorates, which include the traditional humanities (philosophy, history, education, theology, and geography) and the social sciences (sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science). A third area (with 69 master’s and 41 doctorate courses) comprises linguistics, the arts, and the fine arts. Master’s courses in the social field altogether account for 27.7 percent of all master’s courses validated by CAPES and for 24.37 percent of all doctorate courses. The greatest number of courses per discipline is found at master’s level in education (47 master’s degrees and 20 doctorates), the arts (44 master’s degrees and 29 doctorates), and psychology (28 master’s degrees and 16 doctorates), with high figures also being observed for economics (26 and 11), administration (23 and 8), and sociology (21 and 12). In Mexico, the other Latin American country with a high proportion of postgraduate courses, it has not been possible to identify the total number of courses for the social sciences, although information has been obtained on enrolments and graduates. Registered postgraduate numbers in the social sciences in 1997 were 37,160 (42.3 percent). If the education and humanities population is added to this, a figure of 53,550 (61 percent) is obtained.

The growth in the number of postgraduate students in the various social disciplines and the humanities is uneven and significant differences exist between courses at the various levels. The specialization level is dominated by courses leading to professional qualifications, for example, administration (1,083 enrolments), law (1,359), taxation and finance (2,231), psychology (558), and sales marketing (435). The master’s degree level also has many students enrolled in professional qualifying courses in administration (16,923), law (2,851), taxation and finance (2,425), and psychology (2,248) but it already shows the presence of some courses directed at training for research, for example, in economics and development (2,104), social sciences (603), and communication sciences (518). At doctorate level, with much lower numbers, law enjoys the greatest number of students (478), followed by the social sciences (342), anthropology and archaeology (246), and economics and development (158). With regard to the most relevant disciplines for promoting a core of social researchers, only a modest expansion is noted at master’s level, which can be attributed to the absence of diversified options on the labor market and to the fact that the academic market does not appear large enough to absorb future new researchers. A particularly noticeable drop of 44.5 percent in sociology enrolments has occurred since the mid-1980s. During the same period the number of economics students underwent a major increase of 270.4 percent, in anthropology the figure grew by 62.8 percent, and in history by 66.3 percent. At doctoral level, although increases are found in the five social and human science research disciplines, there are only 952 students at that level, representing 15.5 percent of total doctorate numbers in 1997.

3. Social Research And Its Institutional Loci

The bulk of current centers has been established since 1970, especially between 1970 and the early 1980s. The proliferation of centers in the last third of the twentieth century seems to be inspired by needs of various kinds. Part of the reason for this can be found in the impetus given to the whole of higher education throughout those years. Many were set up as an aid to teaching, others because of the need to explain local or regional realities or on account of some particular social or cultural problem. The smallest number were probably established in order to promote theoretical, methodological, and instrumental progress and innovation. It is also important to note, however, that a considerable proportion of the existing centers has been set up since the mid-1980s, with an emphasis on education, economics, anthropology, and sociology centers. Other centers were also set up for history and administration during this period. Certain disciplines, such as education and anthropology, although cultivated in a large number of traditional centers, have recently received a boost that increased their number. Institutional and disciplinary variety is the norm.

Different social science trends and models are found in the region: at one extreme, are the early ‘modern’ programs, such as the Sociology Institute of Buenos Aires University and, soon afterwards, the Torcuato di Tella Institute, in Argentina; FLACSO in its several branches (Buenos Aires, Brasilia, Santiago, San Jose, Havana, Quito, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico D.F., and Santo Domingo), born as a cooperation initiative between UNESCO and the governments of the region and aimed at promoting education, research, and technical cooperation in the social sciences throughout the subcontinent; the University Research Institute of Rio de Janeiro (IUPERJ), the Postgraduate Program in Social Anthropology (PPGAS) of the National Museum, also in Rio; the Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP) in Sao Paulo; the Department of Political Science in the Federal University of Minas Gerais, and the Integrated Master’s Degree Program in Economics and Sociology (PIMES), which was taken over by the Federal University of Pernambuco in Brazil; El Colegio de Mexico; the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) of Mexico; the Institute of Sociological Research, which was soon renamed as Sociology Institute of the University of Chile and the Center for Economic Research and the Sociology School in the Catholic University of Chile; and the Development Studies Center (CENDES) in Venezuela.

At the other extreme are the programs created through the efforts of groups of lecturers, who utilized the material, administrative, and personnel resources available in the undergraduate departments and survived by ‘stealing’ undergraduate facilities. Between these two extremes arose programs at the new, more flexible, more modern, and less bureaucratic universities where the shift in activities from the undergraduate to the postgraduate phase enjoys more institutional support, which in turn helps to attract external financing for research and infrastructure. Los Andes and del Valle Universities in Colombia, the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) and Brasilia University (UNB) in Brazil, the Ibero-American University and the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico are in this situation. The courses with the most satisfactory results seem to have enjoyed a greater relative autonomy in their links with university administrative structures.

Many recent centers have been set up with inexperienced staff who are trained to below doctorate level, while the more experienced researchers remain at the more soundly established centers. The proportion of researchers under the age of 35, however, is noticeably small, which indicates an aging tendency on the part of the researcher population and suggests an uncertain future for some of these disciplines. In Brazil, considerable effort has been made to ensure the highest possible level of training for university lecturers involved in postgraduate activity and in research. Argentina, Chile, and Mexico in recent years have established government programs for providing further and refresher training for the teaching staff covering, among other things, the postgraduate training of academic personnel. Colombia boosted its general postgraduate scholarship program during the 1990s with the support of COLCIENCIAS, but of late seems to have lost its dynamic edge.

The level of geographical concentration of research units in the various countries, particularly the largest, have tended to fall since the 1970s, resulting in a slightly more balanced distribution, although a strong concentration persists in metropolitan areas. In Mexico, all states have research centers in some social discipline, which is not the case in other knowledge areas. There, however, as in Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina, the persistence of the regional question, despite endeavors to ensure a better distribution of resources and the repeated attempts to establish research groups in the province, suggests that perhaps other causes should also be examined, for example, the possibility that academic institutions in these regions possess less autonomy and are over dependent on the political interests and views of dominant local groups. Situations of this kind can impede the introduction of universal criteria for personnel recruitment and the distribution of resources, thus exacerbating the factionalism inherent in academic structures.

Although the social sciences show a substantial increase in postgraduate courses, no equivalent impact is perceivable on the percentage of recognized researchers in those countries where the formal recognition of researcher status has been introduced. In Mexico, while the creation of the National Researchers System (SNI) led to the formal establishment of a social, institutional, and normative framework for recognition and validation of the researcher’s activity and position, it is clear that it also brought with it standard specific requirements with which the academic community is virtually compelled to identify. The social science and humanities field is the one with the smallest concentration of researchers included in the SNI, despite the fact that it has the largest numbers of graduate students and a significant proportion of postgraduate students; and 60 percent (1,053 researchers) are at the lower level, which suggests low productivity according to the program’s measuring parameters. Although this is the area of the SNI that has been growing most consistently since 1984, the population willing to participate in this program appears to have reached a ceiling fluctuating around 800 yearly applications.

In Venezuela, a similar program to the Mexican one exists, the Researcher Promotion Program (PPI), with features and trends resembling the Mexican ones. It includes 18.9 percent of researchers in the social science area (270 out of a total of 1,422 researchers in 1997) even though the social sciences account for more than 80 percent of students following degree courses. Nearly 50 percent of the social researchers recognized by the program are situated at the lower level, which implies the minimum productivity acceptable under the program.

The type and rate of production are influenced by disciplinary patterns and traditions: the more ‘empirical’ or ‘pragmatic’ disciplines generally are slanted towards production with more immediate implications (e.g., articles); books, on the other hand, appear to be typical expressions of the more traditional disciplines. There are, nevertheless, differences in styles and standards of publishing and, in general, of production of results, even within the same discipline, depending on whether the researcher’s approach tends to be local or international. As an illustration of the support and encouragement given to publishing standards, it is worth mentioning the existence of significant publishing industries in Mexico and Brazil, which supply the needs of the educational sector and recently have been responding to pressures upon the academic market to produce a greater number of results in the framework of the evaluation systems laid down.

A large number of social science journals is published in several countries. Given the current initiative of producing the Latin American and Iberian Index of scientific periodical journals (LATINDEX), it is expected that a supplementary regional index to the Science Citation Index, with the scientific production in Spanish and Portuguese will become available in the not too distant future. Meanwhile, several countries have undertaken the task of evaluating the formal and eventually the substantive quality of the journals locally produced and thus several national lists of selected good quality social science journals are available in the National Science Council offices. So far, however, those journals have very limited international visibility (Cetto and Alonso 1999). As an illustration of this, it may be said that the Institute of Scientific Information’s Journal Citation Reports (1997 Social Science edition) included only one Argentine journal (Desarrollo Economico), two Brazilian ones (Dados-Revista de Ciencias Sociais and Revista de Saude Publica), one from Colombia (Revista Latinoamericana de Psicologıa), and four Mexican ones (Revista Mexicana de Psicologıa, Salud Mental, Salud Publica de Mexico, and Trimestre Economico).

In addition to this and turning inwards in the region, it is observed that despite the existence of a large number of specialist journals, an essay style prevails in many fields. This essay style may be largely the result of an intellectual tradition, but it also relates to the limited market for employment in academic institutions, which means that opportunities for social scientists in the region often have been provided by publishing houses catering for general readership, by the daily and weekly press, by the political parties, by consultancy, and the preparation of technical reports for the governmental and private sectors. An important consequence of such situations frequently has been to restrict the range of topics covered and approaches to working and writing. In many places, issues have concentrated on a limited number of topics and options for discussion around a small number of individuals. This may have hindered the development of a social science involving the use of more complex quantitative techniques or the handling of less fashionable international literature. It is not easy to sustain a debate on any topic in an academic symposium when the results of the discussion bear the imprint, to a greater or lesser extent, of the views of a particular political party or agree with what the journalists of the mass media contrive, or wish, to hear or consider that their readers wish to read, or reproduces discussions and views developed and sustained in the world intellectual centers of Paris or Boston. This has been the price to pay for the role of intelligentsia that many social scientists have assumed in Latin America.

4. Substantive Issues: Themes And Methods

At the crossroads of institutional articulation and thematic development in the region is found the Latin American Social Sciences Council (CLACSO). Since its creation in 1966, it has formed the most extensive coordination body for social science research centers in Latin America and the Caribbean, currently including 101 member centers. Its Executive Secretariat has always operated in Buenos Aires. CLACSO has developed a work program which strengthens interchange mechanisms in order to bring about a greater integration of Latin American social sciences and which defends the working conditions of social scientists at member centers and other institutions in the region whose academic activities and/or personnel were marked by years of authoritarian repression in a number of countries. Its postgraduate program was drawn up to deal with two major areas: the Southern Cone Research Program, which, with financial support from the Council, provided aid in the countries of the sub region to researchers experiencing work difficulties because of their political views; and in cooperation with the United Nations Development Program and UNESCO, the Young Researchers Training Program, since it had become apparent that the main problems in the region were a lack of funds for research and the difficulties experienced by young graduates of universities in obtaining funds from international agencies.

In recent years, the Council’s academic activity has been directed at its own medium and long-term planning against a background of institutional reorganization, at rethinking the Working Groups Program in order to counteract the effects of thematic organizational dispersion, and to continue action in subjectmatter areas of particular importance for the analysis of democratization and adjustment processes in the region. Its 20 working groups have a membership of some 3,000 researchers in a program of academic interchange, debates, and publications which is very illustrative of the thematic interests in the region. Among them are youth, international economics; education, work, and social exclusion; memory and human development, poverty and social policy; unions, workers, and social movements; Mercosur and integration; and political parties and electoral systems. In view of the increasing development of various Latin American information networks, the Network of Networks (Red de Redes) project was established with the support of the IDRC in Ottawa in order to improve access by the final user to existing information resources by linking up 18 regional information networks. Its web site (URL: http://www.clacso.org) contains extensive information on research institutions in the region, regional databases about researchers and research projects, a virtual library, and other services.

On the cognitive, social, and functional levels, what social scientists do when they claim to be carrying out research is, in fact, extremely varied. Views on what constitutes research not only vary according to fields of academic activity but also depending on ideological and personal approaches and they evolve over time. In Latin America the great diversity that exists in disciplines and research styles mostly has developed in different socio-institutional contexts. Where policies, either general or relating to individual establishments, have existed, however, these have tended towards homogeneity usually patterned on the norms of the physical sciences. New and old themes combine in novel contributions to social understanding. The necessary linkage between the rich accumulated conceptual legacy of the region’s social thought and that required by the new heuristics concerns as much the social sciences as the social movements in today’s world of change in sociopolitical and technoscientific models.

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