Participant observation, documents, visual methods. Participant Observation

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1 Participant observation, documents, visual methods Participant Observation Ilpo Koskinen Prof., Dr.Soc.Sci. (sociology) University of Art and Design Helsinki Observation and Participant Observation Some concepts observation more generally vs. participant observation field research ethnography, ethnographic research Researchers role (Raymond Gold) varies from open to covert for ethical reasons, open role is the norm, but how about studying neonatzists? Before field phase (1) Defining research questions (2) Choosing the site The site should be the best "laboratory animal" you can get remember safety! Entering the field various places require different tactics public places, formal organizations, informal groups and communities 1

2 In the field A Main Instrument: The research diary the single most crucial thing in observational studies is the quality of field notes memory is unreliable but in a typical Ph.D. thesis, the time span between making a field note and writing it into a book may be 4 years you have to write notes that are clear enough to be intelligible after 4 years! What to Write A journalist's memory aid list whom what, where, when, how, (why) James Spradley s list (1980: 78): place material environment actors action discrete acts event (how activities constitute an event: socializing, program and drinking = a party); time (action over time) participants motivations mood How to Write be simple, concrete, use your "naive" concepts that is, don't write things down using abstract general scientific concepts be a naïve empiricist, and be proudly so! When to write while observing when this is not possible (1) write short notes while observing (2) expanded these notes as quickly as possible into complete sentences (3) expand these notes later into a diary Additional elements in the diary Ideas, theories and other kinds of hunches Personal notes Sampling You can t observe everything at once What interests observers is determined not just by their interest, but also by their current "sampling" scheme! typically sampling proceeds from simple to complex first observations are typically useless Leaving the field "saturation" when we do not find anything new anymore don t be lazy! informs decision a lot what is your relationship to the site after field work: these can vary from friendships to consulting 2

3 Debates Recently, there have been several debate about participant observation cultural biases. Is ethnography tourism? Writing compelling but authorative stories - whose voice should count? also, there are new, typically subjective writing conventions however, these are marginal phenomenon even in anthropology still, it is good to keep in mind one thing participant observation is the prototype of qualitative analysis wonderfully rich method but it is also a boring and an inefficient method Documents Documents are a good source of information for every researcher, not just historians typically easy to collect, store, manage, use in writing non-reactive: documents have not been produced for the researcher Problems biases: elites, organizations, produce documents more than, say, ordinary people decision-making: many documents show the world as an object of administration access and finding materials modern bureaucracies produce tons of documents archives have their own logic, different from the researcher s access often key documents are hard to get from archives both personal documents and key decision-making documents public and private sectors differ: in the Nordic countries, the public sector is relatively open 3

4 Criticism of Sources In searching documents, commonsense helps institutional and personal documents differ in style, content, and storage public and secret documents further divide documents Before building an interpretation on some document, go through this procedure search the original document, the one closest to the object of interest study its content before you trust it: contradictions, illogical features, too much logic; the writer s ability and motives to tell the truth Oral history Historical memory exists not just in documents, but also in minds interviewing is a good source of information read Paul Thompson s marvelous book The Voice of the Past. Textual analyses Keep in mind it is possible to study how texts construct reality rhetorically in terms of stories for example, how personnel categories are ordered tells about an organization s values see Silverman, David, Interpreting Qualitative Data, which is a good source for textual analysis Structure Other methods Visual methods photographic interviewing (get John Collier s books, they are old but still the best) using photographs and video to support interviews easy to do, a good way to manage reactivity 4

5 Cultural Probes self-observation packages given to people to document their own world collected, analyzed sometimes researchers check their analysis with subjects, sometimes they don t (orig. developed at the Royal College of Art, London) Studying the future with prototypes for example, people respond to questions about future technologies with frown you have to give them experience with it before a study prototypes are a useful method for that imagination counts! Appendix: Transcription questions? Data has to be transcribed to make it useful. you don t do anything with 25 hours of audiotape. It is too difficult to browse it you need to transcribe it -- put it on paper audiotapes are the data, but transcripts are a map to it, and often good enough for analysis they also ease writing tremendously 5

6 Four levels of transcriptions Level 1: Contents with notes X said that food does not afect his choice of the airliner still he likes the Lufthansa coffee and the service in Singapore Level 2: level 1 + quotes...still he likes the Lufthansa coffee and the service in Singapore For example, once I was flying KLM and swallowed a chicken bone, which almost choked me. After that... Level 3: In verbatim Perhaps the most typical accuracy is this: One fellow wanted to sleep quite a bit. I talked to him two or three times and told him finally that he d change or else it meant his job (Gouldner 1954: 139). Level 4: Studying interaction next page is from my Ph.D. thesis. In it five managers talk about projects in a review meeting. The transcript has lots of detail, for example (.) means a pause of 0.1 seconds and (h) a laughter token w(h)(h)it(h)in a w(h)ord This kind of accuracy is necessary if you study interaction, but not elsewhere Here the transcript covers also body positions and gaze directions 684 R Joku, (.) joku saattaa ostaa sen pelkästään 685 nimen per#usteella.# 686 (0.3) 687 V Sait tulee [vielä ( ) ] 688 L [Pettyäks(h)(h)e]e(h)n 689 L si(h)t[t(h)e s(h)is(h)/äl[töön VAI] 690 V [$ HHh,$ [/HOH HOH] HA 691 V [HA HA [H A H hah\] 692 L [HEH HEH[H E H ] HEH\][.hhhh 693 I? [ $hm hm$ ] [ 694 R [/E:i, (.) sehän 695 on hy\vä. 696 L $ $hh hm$ 01 A We d go over to Mount Vernon? And play a 02 ga:me? And see Mount Vernon. A s gaze Eye roll with a head shake 03 ( )((=0.7 pause)) B s gaze A s gaze [X Christ it wa[s just go:rgeous. It was so B s gaze B s body Nod nod nod A s gaze /((katse pois, vrt. kuva)) A s gaze ,,,, 05 A beautiful. And our place was such a dump B s gaze,,,,,,,,,/,,,,,,,,, B s body nod nod A s gaze 06 compared to it. B s gaze,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, B s body nod nod 6

7 this was scare tactics... Don t overtranscribe! It takes about 75 min to transcribe an hour of tape at level 1, but easily hours in level 4 not just costs are an issue, but also utility: you can make sense of very exact transcripts only if you are a conversation analyst questions? Sources Participant Observation Duneier, Mitchell Slim s Table. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hammersley, Martyn ja Paul Atkinson Ethnography: Principles in Practice. London: Routledge. Gold, Raymond Rules of Sociological Field Obsevations. Social Forces 36: History (this is a Nordic example; any method book works) Dahl, Ottar Grunntrekk i historieforskningens metodelaere. Universitetsforlaget. (In Norwegian) Thompson, Paul The Voice of the Past: Oral History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Misc. Koskinen, Ilpo, Katja Battarbee and Tuuli Mattelmäki (Eds.) Empathic Design. Helsinki: IT Press. Gaver, W., T. Dunne and E. Pacenti Cultural Probes. Interactions 6 (1), Jan-Feb: pp