Turn insights into solutions

​The value of our work lies in our ability to provide rich, detailed insights into people's experiences, attitudes, and behaviors. We reveal patterns that go unnoticed in quantitative data, helping anticipate trends and identify changes in how people think and act. At the same time, we offer the context necessary to understand what shapes these attitudes — enabling the creation of experiences that are genuinely meaningful rather than merely relevant.

 

It is through direct conversations — with experts or laypeople, individually or in groups, online or face-to-face — that we do our most important work. Books and films matter too: they offer ways of entering lives and histories that differ from our own, expanding the range of what we can understand. Empathy, in this sense, is less a natural gift than a discipline — a tool for remaining aware of the biases we carry as researchers shaped by our own particular backgrounds and histories.

 

Understanding others' perspectives is an ongoing effort, not a skill to master. The context of each story is always shifting, and our relationship to it shifts too. We personally experienced the collapse of the Soviet system — and found in it a sense of opening, of possibility. That experience is real. But it is not the only experience of that moment. Svetlana Alexievich's Secondhand Time documents something entirely different: the collapse of a familiar world, the disorientation of people whose entire framework for making sense of life had been removed. Both experiences of the same historical event are true. Holding that without resolving it into a single narrative is what empathy requires.

 

As researchers, this means approaching every interaction with a specific kind of attention: recognizing that behind any opinion lies a complex interplay of personal history and social pressure, and that what is said is never the whole story. What remains unsaid — held back by experience, cultural norms, or the anticipation of judgment — is often where the meaning is.

 

Empathy, understood this way, means creating space for others to express themselves freely, without projecting our own experience onto theirs. Carl Rogers called this unconditional positive regard: the suspension of judgment as a condition of genuine openness. Our goal is not to gather data but to understand the people behind it — on their own terms, in their own words, without deciding in advance what their experience should look like.

 

This requires navigating a tension that never fully resolves. Richard Sennett's The Corrosion of Character shows how modern work culture erodes people's sense of self, making it harder for them to construct coherent narratives about their own lives. External pressures — economic instability, social inequality, the demand for constant reinvention — shape not just what people do but how they communicate and what they are able to say. Empathy that ignores these structural forces mistakes the symptom for the person.

 

Empathy is not simply an emotional response. It is an intellectual practice — one that demands more than naïve listening. It requires constant reflection on what an interaction evokes in us, what gaps remain, what we might be missing or projecting. It requires asking the right questions, tolerating silence, and remaining genuinely open to being surprised by what we find.

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​"Perspectivism — as Nietzsche defined it — is inescapable: everyone has their own truth, or rather everyone has the truth of their own interests. However, it is not impossible for the sociologist to work toward objectifying experiences they have not themselves had, provided they know from the outset that the permanent danger is identification — 'putting yourself in someone else's place.' And if there is one scientific error in sociology, it is precisely that one: you cannot put yourself in someone else's place, for good reason — you are not in the same place. By definition, an employer cannot put himself in a worker's place, and vice versa. They may have a very empathetic psychology."

 

Pierre Bourdieu — General Sociology