Rashomon Effect - Qualitative Research

Rashomon

The film starts with main 3 characters: a woodcutter, a priest and a commoner hiding under Rashomon gate during the heavy rain. They are retelling to each other stories from court of a rape of one woman and murder of young samurai. Every story represents one person participating in the crime scene - the woman (wife), the samurai (husband) and the bandit. Every time the statement is slightly different and it is not obvious which is the right statement. All believe that the statement of the samurai (who spoke through the medium) is true because he was dead. He claimed that he killed himself. That was finally disproved by the woodcutter, who had seen it all and was not interested to be involved in the court, long after the process of investigation. These stories showed us that everyone changed it because of the different perception of the environment and events around him or her according to the time.

We have watched this movie because of the interpretation of the important sociological phenomenon such as Rashomon effect called after this movie and more general Thomas theorem. It would be a nice example of qualitative research because there is no option to measure the data and to apply quantitative approaches. And it shows us practical part of this subject - a useful tool in the investigations of crimes and other problems.

The Rashomon effect is described by these four different stories which show us the effect of the subjectivity on perception of the past and bring us very different results with relatively comparable elements. We might tell that with time we will get totally different results because people usually think all situations through back and forth and at the end is very difficult to get the objective situation which was at the beginning.

Thomas theorem is described by the quote:"if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences." In other words, the interpretation of a situation causes the action. This interpretation is not objective. Actions are affected by subjective perceptions of situations. Whether there even is an objectively correct interpretation is not important for the purposes of helping guide individuals' behaviour.

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