Developing a New Major

complete observer

• your identity as a research is hidden, don’t interact with people around you, just take notes/make video/sit behind one-way mirror
• your study doesn’t interfere with what you’re observing, doesn’t change it
• you can’t clarify anything tho, can’t ask questions about what you’re seeing while you’re seeing it so you dn’t know for sure thatyour interpretation is what hte people think too – especially bothersome when you know little about the culture you’re studying (you don’t know fo rsure what is normal or not, what hte daily routines are)
• Erving Goffman – dramaturgical perspective – we have lots of rituals we use in day to day social interactions like in elevators nad waiting for the bus, rituals that help us maintain social relatioships, avoid intimacy by being in clase physical spaces (he did a lot of straight observation – he’d be good to read)
• Robert Sommer – also did lots of everyday interaction observation into how we create personal space (he’d be another good one to read – he looked at how people stake out personal space in libraries while studying)
• things in the environment may try to draw you n to be more involved with the activities – people may invite you to particpate and be insulted if you refuse, you might see things that you think are just wrong and htat you want to correct but you can’t and stay impartial

observer as participant

• the people you’re studying know you’re there but they forget it eventually, you have minimal impact, minimal presence
• this is hard to achieve – could put tape recorders/video cameras in a place to record interactions over time, and eventuallyu people would forget they were there and start to act more normally

Participant as observer

• you are active and full participant in the activities and everyone knows you’re a reseracher
• by participating you become an insider, but there is still a sense that you are different, an outsider, because of teh observation activities that are going on

Complete participant

• you’re a full participant, active in everything in the culture – - but they don’t know you’re a researcher, you’re undercover
• like the complete observer, you have to make your observations covertly
• you’re deceving the people you’re studying (some peopel say that’s ok because you’re doing it for scientific study, others because it’s the only way to get good data or to study groups that might not otherwise be available (like cults)
• ask yourself – do the gains outweigh the losses, can’t ask questions that will blow your cover, ca’nnt write down notes ont eh fly so probably going to loe some observations, need to make sure there is time when you can get away and be ourself anddo your analysis, some of the gains include being able to give sometehing back to the culture by your interactions
• deception brings up lots of ethical issues, also brings up the problem of “going native” and starting to think that you are one of the people you’re pretending to be which can mess up our analysis

notes from some web pages they recommend – http://uk.geocities.com/balihar_sanghera/qrmparticipantobservation.html

observation is the toughest method – - “It requires researchers to spend a great deal of time in surrounding within which researchers may not be familiar (e.g., factory floor or bank office); to secure and maintain relationships with people with who, they have little personal affinity (e.g., criminals and market traders); to take a lot of notes on what appears to be everyday mundane happenings (e.g., people’s body language and speech patterns, and their arrival and departures); to possibly incurring some personal risk in their fieldwork (e.g., accidents at work); and to spend months of analysis after the fieldwork, analysing field-notes and diaries. Nevertheless, to those who are prepared and willing, it is also one of the most rewarding methods which yields fascinating insights into people’s social lives and relationships…”

quality of hte project depends on teh quality of the field notes, so the more time you spend in teh culture the better, the more varied your settings in the culture the better, the more familiar you are with the language (customs, slang) the better, the more intimately involved you are with hte culture the better

goal is to understand a particular setting – not create generalizable observations for whole countries – it’s limited, it’s represetational not generalizable

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