The Dog in the Night-Time: Negative Evidence in Social Research

The overwhelming emphasis in social research on collecting positive data has had the dangerous effect of minimizing the worth of negative evidence, which is defined in this paper as either (1) the nonoccurrence of events, (2) an occurrence that is not reacted to or not reported (because it is outside the frame of reference of the population or of the researcher), or (3) although noted in its raw form, distorted in its interpretation or withheld from analysis and report. A paradigm of seven types of negative evidence is developed: (1) Events Do Not Occur; (2) Population Is NotAware of Events; (3) Population Wishes to Hide Events; (4) Commonplace Events Are Overlooked; (5) Effects of the Researcher's Idea Set; (6) Unconscious Non-Reportage; and (7) Conscious Non-Reportage. Each type is discussed, and examples are presented. The paper concludes with a discussion of the place of negative evidence in both inductively and deductively based social research, and a caution against ignoring such