Category: Qualitative Methods

Ethnography literally means a description of a people. It is important to under­stand that ethnography deals with people in the collective sense, not with indi­viduals. As such, it is a way of studying people in organized, enduring groups, which may be referred to as communities or societies. The distinctive way of life that characterizes such a group is its culture. The study of culture involves an examination of the group’s learned and shared behaviors, customs, and beliefs.

The ethnographic approach to the study of human groups began with anthro­pologists in the late 19 th and early 20th centuries who were convinced that the armchair speculations of earlier social philosophers were inadequate for under­standing the way real people actually lived. They came to the conclusion that only in the field could a scholar truly encounter the dynamics of the lived human experience. Those in Britain (and other parts of the British Empire, later the Commonwealth, such as Australia and India) developed one form of ethno­graphic research. It reflected their fieldwork in areas then still under colonial control, societies such as those in Africa or the Pacific that seemed to be pre­served in their traditional forms. In retrospect, of course, we can see that the colonial encounter drastically changed many of those societies, but a hundred years ago it was possible to look at them as being relatively untouched by the outside. The British therefore emphasized a study of the enduring institutions of society; that approach came to be called social anthropology. The two most influ­ential social anthropologists of the British school were A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronislaw Malinowski (McGee and Warms, 2003, see especially pp. 153-215).

By contrast, anthropologists in the United States were interested in studying native American people whose traditional ways of life had by then already been drastically altered, if not completely destroyed. The US anthropologists could not assume that native people lived in the context of social institutions that rep­resented their indigenous condition. If culture could not be found in those insti­tutions, then it would have to be reconstructed through the historical memory of the survivors. American anthropology thus came to be referred to as cultural anthropology. The most influential American cultural anthropologist was Franz Boas, who trained a whole generation of American scholars, including Alfred Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Robert Lowie (McGee and Warms, 2003, see especially pp. 128-52).

Malinowski and Boas were both strong advocates of field-based research and both advocated what has come to be known as participant observation, a way of conducting research that places the researcher in the midst of the community he or she is studying. Because of complications arising out of international condi­tions during the First World War, Malinowski, who was conducting a field study of the Trobriand Islands (Western Pacific), was stranded at his field site for four years. Although it has rarely been possible to duplicate that unplanned feat, Malinowski’s Trobriand ethnography has often been held up as the gold standard for the long-term total immersion of a researcher in the society under study.

Beginning in the 1920s, sociologists at the University of Chicago adapted the anthropologists’ ethnographic field research methods to the study of social groups in ‘modern’ communities in the United States (Bogdan and Biklen, 2003). The influence of this ‘Chicago school’ ultimately affected such fields as education, business, public health, nursing, and mass communications.

Source: Angrosino Michael (2008), Doing Ethnographic and Observational Research, SAGE Publications Ltd; 1st edition.

As the ethnographic method has spread across disciplines, it has become associ­ated with a wide variety of theoretical orientations:

• structure-functionalism
• symbolic interactionism
• feminism
• Marxism
• ethnomethodology
• critical theory
• cultural studies
• postmodernism

1. Structure-functionalism

This was the dominant school of anthropology in Britain for much of the twenti­eth century, and it has long had philosophical and methodological links to soci­ology in both the United Kingdom and the United States. Structure-functionalism is characterized by the following basic concepts:

• The organic analogy, which means that society is thought of as analogous to a biological organism with structures and functions parallelling those of the physical organ systems. Each social institution, like each organ system, has a particular role to play in keeping the entire society/organism alive, but no one of them can operate optimally unless properly connected to all the others.
• A natural science orientation, which means that society is supposed to be stud­ied empirically, the better to uncover its underlying patterns and overall order.
• A narrowed conceptual field, which means that structure-functionalists prefer to focus on society and its subsystems (e.g. the family, economy, political institutions, beliefs); they have paid comparatively little attention to art, lan­guage, personality development, technology, and the natural environment.
• A sense of universality, which means that all social institutions and their respective functions are assumed to be found in equivalent structures in all societies.

• The pre-eminence of kinship studies, which means that family ties are presumed to be the ‘glue’ that holds societies together; in modern societies, other institutions take on roles equivalent to the traditional family, but pre­sumably always do so on the model of the family.
• A tendency toward equilibrium, which means that societies are assumed to be characterized by harmony and internal consistency; disruptions or anom­alies are ultimately corrected by mechanisms existing within the society itself. This assumption leads to a tendency to see societies as somewhat static in their overall balance, and hence to a disinclination to study historical factors making for change in social life.

In terms of method, the structure-functionalists are strong advocates of field­work based on participant observation, which, in the ideal at least, is a long-term commitment, since the underlying order of a society can only be revealed by patient immersion in the lives of the people under study. A major emphasis of ethnographic fieldwork in the structure-functionalist tradition is the linkage of rules of behavior (norms) with behavior itself; disparities between what people said they ought to do and what they actually did are de-emphasized. Such an assumption works best in small, relatively homogeneous communities; hence the structure-functionalists have favored fieldwork in traditional, isolated societies or in bounded neighborhoods in modern urban areas.

Structure-functionalists approach ethnography as if it were a purely empirical exercise. People’s beliefs and behaviors are considered to be real social facts; they are ‘data’ that are to be collected by objective researchers with a minimum of interpretation. Although they prefer to work with qualitative data (as opposed to numerical data generated by surveys and so forth), they uphold the scientific nature of ethnography because their data collection is in service to a view of order in social life, the pre-eminence of facts over interpretation, and by the notion that every event has a function within a coherent system.

Because kinship is seen to be the key to social organization, the structure- functionalists are particularly fond of using genealogical methods to reconstruct and illuminate all aspects of a society. They also tend to use the method of the interview schedule, which means that questions are asked verbally by a researcher, who fills in the answers; this approach differs from that of the questionnaire, which is distributed to respondents who then fill it out themselves. In the ideal, all interviews are done in the indigenous language, although this stipulation must sometimes be realized in the form of paid translators.

Ethnographic research in this tradition thus relies heavily on the personal inter­actions of researchers and their ‘subjects’. While the data are believed to be objectively real, the circumstances in which those data are collected cannot be easily replicated. Hence, the structure-functionalist tradition of research empha­sizes validity over ‘reliability’ (the latter being a criterion of the scientific method 4 emphasizing replicable experiments).

Ethnography in this tradition requires lengthy immersion in particular societies. Given the logistical constraints on carrying out that mission, it is usually not possible to conduct genuinely cross-cultural research. A cross-cultural picture might emerge from the gradual accretion of particularistic studies, but the use of a standardized research design carried out by researchers simultaneously in sev­eral different locations is not a common practice. One of the perhaps unintended consequences of this tendency is an overemphasis of the perceived uniqueness of each society.

Structure-functionalist ethnography serves an inductive rather than a deductive agenda for scientific inquiry. That is, researchers begin with a particular tribe, vil­lage, community, or neighborhood that they are interested in learning about, rather than with a theory, model, or hypothesis to test. It is considered appropri­ate for themes or patterns to emerge from the data collected in the course of fieldwork. (See Turner, 1978, pp. 19-120, for a more complete treatment of the history, philosophy, and methods of functionalism.)

2. Symbolic interactionism

This orientation has been very popular in sociology and social psychology and it also has some adherents in anthropology. Unlike those social scientists who might seem to overemphasize the role of culture in ‘shaping’ human behavior, interactionists prefer to see people as active agents rather than as interchangeable parts in a large organism, passively acted upon by forces external to themselves.

Society is not a set of interlocking institutions, as the structure-functionalists might have thought, but an ever-changing kaleidoscope of individuals interacting with each other. As the nature of those interactions shifts, so society is constantly changing, too. Interactionism is therefore a dynamic rather than a static approach to the study of social life.

There are several varieties of interactionism (four, seven, or eight, depending on which account one reads), but all of them share some basic assumptions:

• people live in a world of learned meanings, which are encoded as symbols and which are shared through interactions in a given social group;
• symbols are motivational in that they impel people to carry out their activities;
• the human mind itself grows and changes in response to the quality and extent of interactions in which the individual engages;
• the self is a social construct – our notion of who we are develops only in the course of interacting with others.

Ethnographic fieldwork in the interactionist tradition is geared toward uncover­ing the meanings social actors attach to their actions. The structure-functionalist emphasis on behavior as a set of objective facts is replaced by a more subjective delineation of how people understand what they do. Some interactionists refer to 5 this process as ‘sympathetic introspection’, while others prefer to use the German word verstehen in homage to the great German sociologist Max Weber, who introduced the concept into modern social science discourse. In either case, the implication is that the researcher must become immersed in the world of his or her subjects; he or she cannot be a neutral observer of their activities, but must become subjectively one with them. The key to interactionist ethnography is the uncover­ing of the system of symbols that gives meaning to what people think and do.

One particularly influential interactionist is the sociologist Erving Goffman, who developed what he called a dramaturgical approach to the study of interac­tions. He was concerned with how people act and form relationships, because he believed that these processes helped people achieve meaning in their lives. His research often involved descriptions of how people construct their ‘presentations of self’ and then perform those presentations in front of others. Goffman sug­gested that there is intentionality behind such performances, in that they are engaged in with an eye toward making the best possible impression (as the ‘actor’ understands it) in the view of significant others. They become not simply ‘role makers’, but active ‘role players’.

Because of their interest in the nature of interactions, symbolic interactionists have devoted considerable attention to the interactions that are typical of ethno­graphic fieldwork itself. In a sense, they have been led to conduct an ethno­graphic study of the process of doing ethnography. Briefly summarizing a very large body of literature on this topic, we may say that ethnographers’ interactive roles fall along a continuum with four main points: (a) the complete participant (the researcher is totally immersed in the community and does not disclose his or her research agenda); (b) the participant-as-observer (the researcher is immersed in the community but is known to be conducting research and has permission to do so); (c) the observer-as-participant (the researcher is somewhat detached from the community, interacting with it only on specific occasions, perhaps to conduct interviews or attend organized functions); and (d) the complete observer (the researcher collects completely objective data about the community from afar without becoming involved in its activities or announcing his or her presence). Each of these roles is potentially useful depending on circumstances, although tilting toward the ‘participant’ end of the continuum would seem to serve the goals of symbolic interactionism most effectively. (See Herman and Reynolds, 1994, for a more complete review of the theory and methods of the interactionist approach. See Gold, 1958, for the classic exposition of researcher roles alluded to in this section.)

3. Feminism

This approach to scholarship has in recent decades become prominent in all of the social sciences (and humanities as well, for that matter). Although linked with 6 the sociopolitical movement for women’s rights, scholarly feminism is not the concern solely of women researchers; it represents a general approach to the study of the human social condition. Several basic principles characterize femi­nism in the modern social science context:

• the assumption that all social relations are gendered, which means that a con­sciousness of gender is one of the elementary factors determining a person’s social status;
• the suggestion (not universally shared among feminists, it should be noted) that there is some sort of female ‘essence’ characterized by fundamental qual­ities of nurturance, caring, and a preference for cooperation over competition.

This essence is expressed in different ways in different cultures, but it is rec­ognized in some way in all societies. The reason this suggestion is not uni­versally accepted is because there is a countervailing proposition, to wit:

• the behaviors that are considered typical or one gender or another are socially learned rather than biologically inbred; this does not make them any less important or influential in the way people act and think, but it does move the inquiry away from the biogenetic to the sociocultural perspective. Regardless of whether gender is ‘essential’ or socially learned, there is perceived to be
• a universal sexual asymmetry; even in those rare societies in which men and women are considered to be more or less equal partners, there is a recognition that men and women are different from each other, either because of innate biology or because of differential processes of socialization (the ways in which we learn to take on the behaviors our society tells us are appropriate).

A feminist approach has certain clear implications for the conduct of ethno­graphic research. For one thing, feminists tend to reject the traditional separation of a researcher and her or his ‘subjects’. Such a distinction is seen to reflect the traditional categories of science which, whatever else may be said for it, has long been used as a tool of oppression. Traditional scientific research, with its empha­sis on testing, operational definitions, scales, and rules, is said to have served mainly the interest of those in power, which, in most cases, did not include women. The detached researcher in control of all the elements of a research proj­ect was an authority figure par excellence, and his power was only enhanced by the enforcement of norms of objectivity and neutrality in the conduct of research. Feminists seek to de-center this relationship by a closer identification of the researcher with the community under study. Value-neutrality as a scientific ideal is rejected by feminists, because they actively and explicitly seek to promote the interests of women.

By the same token, the orderly, coherent models of social equilibrium favored by the structure-functionalists (among others) are set aside in favor of a view of social life as sometimes disorderly, incomplete, fragmented. To that end, feminist researchers look to a form of ethnography that allows for empathy, subjectivity, and dialogue, the better to explore the inner worlds of women, even to the point 7

of helping them articulate (and hence overcome) their oppression. The traditional ‘interview’ (which implicitly casts the researcher in a role of power) is also rejected in favor of a more egalitarian dialogue, often embodied in the form of the life history in which a person is encouraged to tell her own story in her own way and in her own terms, with minimal prompting by the researcher. Ethnography based in the life-history approach is seen as a way to ‘give voice’ to people his­torically relegated to the margins of society (and social analysis); it is also a way to preserve the wholeness of individuals, as opposed to other interviewing tech­niques that tend to separate them into analytical component parts. (See Morgen, 1989, for further insights into the emerging feminist perspective.)

4. Marxism

Marxism has had a huge impact on the study of history, economics, and political science, but its influence on those disciplines that deal with human social behav­ior (anthropology, sociology, social psychology) has been somewhat indirect. It is rare to find social scientists representing these disciplines who are Marxist in the fullest philosophical sense, and fewer still (especially in the years since the fall of the Soviet Union) who see Marxism per se as an ideology that might fruit­fully underpin an agenda for social reform. Nonetheless, several important elements of Marxism remain very much in the thick of current discourse about society and culture.

Perhaps the most prominent Marxist-derived concept is that of conflict. Conflict theoreticians propose that society is defined by its interest groups, which are necessarily in competition with each other for basic resources, which may be economic, political, and/or social in nature. Unlike the functionalists, who see society as governed by some sort of core value system and who thus view con­flict as an anomaly that must ultimately be overcome so that the society can re-establish equilibrium, conflict theoreticians believe that conflict is intrinsic to human interaction; indeed, it is the very thing that brings about social change. For Marx and his followers, group conflict is embedded in the institution of social class. Classes arise out of a fundamental division of labor within a society; they represent networks of people defined by their status position within a hierarchi­cal structure. In the Marxist tradition, social change comes about because there is a dialectic process – the contradictions between and among competing social classes are resolved through conflicts of interest. Like feminism, Marxism (or, more broadly, conflict theory) focuses on issues of inequality and oppression, although the latter prefer to think in terms of socioeconomic categories like class, rather than sociocultural ones like gender as the basis of conflict.

Contemporary Marxist scholars are particularly interested in the question of colonialism and how that political-economic institution distorted relations between ‘core’ states (those that maintain a ‘hegemonic’ control over the production and distribution of the world’s goods and services, and that therefore have a near­monopoly on political and military power) and those on the ‘periphery’ (the ones that produce mainly raw materials and are thus perpetually dependent on those in control). This imbalance persists even though colonialism as an institution has disappeared in the formal sense. ‘World systems theory’ is one body of literature that addresses these issues of hegemony and dependency.

Modern-day students of political economy are particularly interested in what is sometimes called material relations, which entails a study of groups interacting with nature in the course of production, interacting with one another in relations of production that differentiate them into classes, and interacting with the ‘cores’, which use their coercive power to shape both production and social relations. This perspective shifts the focus away from self-contained societies, communi­ties, neighborhoods, and so forth, and toward a consideration of the ways in which local groups are part of both regional and international flows of people, goods, services, and power. In order to understand what is going on in any one locality, it is necessary to place that society/community/culture in the context of large-scale political and economic areas in which they are influenced by other societies and cultures. The emphasis thus is trans-cultural rather than particular­istic in nature.

Given these assumptions, it would seem that the somewhat subjective, person­alized style of ethnographic research would not be a comfortable fit for conflict theoreticians or those engaged in neo-Marxist political economic research. However, it is important to note that traditional ethnographic methods may be deployed in the study of local communities, as has long been the case. The cru­cial difference, however, is that such ethnographic studies are designed to demon­strate not the autonomy and near-uniqueness of those communities, but their linkages to other communities that ultimately form global systems. Moreover, the neo-Marxist ethnographer would be inclined to look for evidence of class struc­tures and the conflicts and contradictions inherent within them, even in societies that on the surface may appear to be egalitarian, non-hierarchical, and in a state seemingly approaching equilibrium. (See Wolf, 1982, for a grand exposition of the principles of neo-Marxist political economy and the ways in which traditional research about culture can be transformed to serve the purposes of this theoreti­cal perspective.)

5. Ethnomethodology

This approach to the study of human behavior has been particularly influential in sociology. The aim of ethnomethodologists has been to explain how a group’s sense of reality is constructed, maintained, and changed. It is based on two principal propositions:

• Human interaction is reflexive, which means that people interpret cues (such as words, gestures, body language, the use of space and time) in such a way as to uphold a common vision of reality; evidence that seems to contradict the common vision is either rejected or somehow rationalized into the prevailing system.
• Information is indexed, which means that it has meaning within a particular context; it is thus important to know the biographies of the interacting parties, their avowed purposes, and their past interactions in order to understand what is going on in a particular observed situation.

Ethnomethodological research assumes that social order is maintained by the use of techniques that allow those involved in interactions the sense that they share a common reality. Moreover, the actual content of that reality is less impor­tant than the fact that those involved accept the techniques designed to sustain the interaction. Some of the more important techniques – ones that ethnomethodolo- gists look for when they study social settings – are:

• The search for the ‘normal form’, which means that if the parties to the inter­action begin to feel that they may not actually agree about what is going on, they will offer gestures that cue each other to return to the presumed ‘norm’ in their context.
• The reliance on a ‘reciprocity of perspective’, which means that people actively communicate the belief (accepted as fact) that their experiences are interchangeable, even though they implicitly realize that they are ‘coming from different places’.
• The use of the ‘et cetera principle’, which means that in any interaction much is left unsaid, so that parties to the interaction must either fill in or wait for information needed to make sense of the other’s words or actions; they implic­itly agree not to interrupt to ask explicitly for clarification.

These techniques are almost always subconscious in nature and, as such, are taken for granted by members of a society. The job of the researcher is thus to uncover those covert meanings. Since it is pointless to ask people to elucidate actions they are not consciously aware of, ethnomethodologists favor observa­tional to interview-based research. Indeed, they have refined observational methods down to the most minute ‘micro exchanges’, such as the analysis of con­versations. Some ethnomethodologists contend that language is the fundamental base of the social order, since it is the vehicle of the communication that sustains that order in the first place.

Ethnomethodologists use the ethnographic method in order to grapple with that which is most readily observable, which is taken to be that which is most ‘real’. In most cases, this reality is given substance by the attempts of interacting indi- 10 viduals to persuade each other that the situation in which they find themselves is

both orderly and appropriate to the social setting at hand. What is ‘really real’, as some analysts have put it, is the methods people use in order to construct, main­tain, and sometimes subtly alter for each other a sense of order. The content of what they are saying or doing is less real than the techniques they use to convince each other that it is real. The implication is that ethnography is not used to study some large, transcendent system like ‘culture’ or ‘society’, since such abstrac­tions can never truly order people’s behavior. Rather, ethnographic research is designed to uncover how people convince each other that there really is such a thing as ‘society’ or ‘culture’ in the sense of coherent norms guiding their inter­action. There is no predetermined ‘sense of order’ that makes society possible; rather, it is the capacity of individuals to create and use methods to persuade each other that there is a real social world to which they both belong – and to do so both actively and continually – that is the crux of the matter.

The job of ethnography, then, for the ethnomethodologists is not to answer the question, ‘What is “culture”?’ or ‘What is “society”?’ but to answer the question, ‘How do people convince themselves that “culture” and “society” are viable propositions?’ (See Mehan and Wood, 1975, for a clear exposition of the ethnomethodological position.)

6. Critical theory

This general term covers a variety of approaches to the study of contemporary society and culture. The linking theme is, as the title implies, the use of social science to challenge the assumptions of the dominant institutions of society. Feminism and Marxism, to be sure, join in this endeavor, and may be considered as variants of ‘critical theory’, albeit ones with their own distinctive histories and bodies of literature. In this section, however, we can consider those researchers who use ethnographic methods in order to study and influence public policy and to participate actively in political movements for social change, often playing an advocacy role that steps well beyond traditional notions of researcher neutrality.

The main philosophical approach of critical ethnographers is the development of ‘multiple standpoint epistemologies’, which is an explicit challenge to the tra­ditional assumption that there was an objective, universally understood definition of what constitutes a culture. When a structure-functionalist, for example, described a particular community, his or her understanding was that this descrip­tion could have been generated by any well-trained researcher and that it repre­sented a general consensus on the part of the people in the community that this was the way things were. A multiple standpoint perspective, however, is based on the assumption that not only will there inevitably be different bodies of opinion within the community, but that different ethnographers, who bring their own bag­gage with them so to speak, will produce different images of what they have observed. The different bodies of opinion may not be in explicit conflict with one another, as in Marxist theory, but they certainly do not make for cultural or social homogeneity. For the critical theorist, then, it is important to know which segment of the society is being studied by which ethnographer. A portrait that purports to be a more general view is intrinsically suspect.

Critical theorists have therefore come to favor a style of ethnographic research that is dialogic, dialectical, and collaborative. A dialogic ethnography is one that is not based on the traditional power relationships of interviewer and ‘subject’. Rather the researcher enters into give-and-take conversations with the people of the community. The sense of a ‘dialectic’ perspective is that truth emerges from the confluence of divergent opinions, values, beliefs, and behaviors, not from some false homogenization imposed from the outside. Moreover, the people of the community are not ‘subjects’ at all; they are active collaborators in the research effort. Indeed, in certain forms of critical research (particularly that known as participatory action research), every effort is made to involve the com­munity as active partners in the design and implementation of the research. In the ideal, the main task of the researcher is to train members of the community in the techniques of research so that they can do it for themselves. All of these tenden­cies make for a style of research that is deliberately confrontational; in both the way the research is conducted and in the findings derived from the research, there is an explicit challenge to the status quo. (See Marcus, 1999, for a selection of readings on the critical approach in anthropology and related disciplines.)

7. Cultural studies

Another form of critical theory that has emerged in recent years as a substantial research focus of its own is cultural studies, which is a field of research that examines how the lives of people are shaped by structures that have been handed down historically. Cultural studies scholars are first of all concerned with cultural texts, institutions such as the mass media and manifestations of popular culture that represent convergences of history, ideology, and subjective experience. The aim of ethnography with respect to cultural texts is to discern how the ‘audience’ relates to such texts, and to determine how hegemonic meanings are produced, distributed, and consumed.

An important feature of cultural studies is that researchers are expected to be self-reflexive, which means that they are as much concerned with who they are (with respect to their gender, race, ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation, age, and so forth) as determinants of how they see culture and society as they are with the artifacts of culture and society per se. Traditional ethnographers were, in a way, non-persons – extensions of their tape recorders, as it were. Cultural studies ethnographers, by contrast, are hyper-conscious of their own biographies, which are considered to be legitimate parts of the story.

Cultural studies is by definition an interdisciplinary field, and so its methods derive from anthropology, sociology, psychology, and history. Some have criti­cized this school for favoring ‘theory’ – producing their analyses on the basis of abstract conceptual frameworks in preference to doing fieldwork. While this may be true in some instances, it is also true that fundamental methods of observation, interviewing, and archival research that might be used by any other social researcher are also part of the active toolkit of cultural studies scholars. However, the latter join with other critical theorists in insisting that such methods be put to the service of a sustained challenge to the social and cultural status quo. Whereas other critical scholars might prefer to use their research to advocate for specific policy outcomes, cultural studies scholars are more inclined to think in terms of a general critique of culture itself. (See Storey, 1998, for an exposition of the main concepts and approaches of cultural studies.)

8. Postmodernism

Several of these more recently developed approaches have also been lumped together under the label postmodernism. ‘Modernism’ was the movement in the social sciences that sought to emulate the scientific method in its objectivity and search for general patterns. ‘Postmodernism’, therefore, is all that challenges that positivistic program. Postmodernism embraces the plurality of experience, argues against the reliance on general ‘laws’ of human behavior, and situates all social, cultural, and historical knowledge in the contexts shaped by gender, race, and class.

Although ‘postmodernism’ has come to mean many things to different ana­lysts, there are several principles that seem to hold across the vast spectrum of research so identified:

• Traditional centers of authority are explicitly challenged; this attitude is directed not only at the institutions of hegemonic dominance in society at large, but also at the pillars of the scientific establishment. Postmodernists reject the presumption of scientists to ‘speak for’ those whom they study.
• Human life is fundamentally dialogical and polyvocal, which means that no com­munity can be described as a homogeneous entity in equilibrium; society is by definition a set of competing centers of interest who speak with many voices about what their culture is and is not; by extension, ethnographic research must take into account the multiple voices with which communities actually speak. ‘Culture’ and ‘society’ are concepts arrived at through a process of social construction rather than objective entities – although this does not make them any less ‘real’.
• The ethnographic product is less an objective scientific document than a kind of literary text; it is produced as much through imaginative use of such liter­ary devices as metaphors and symbols as it is through neutral reportage. Moreover, that ethnographic text need not be restricted to the traditional forms of the scholarly monograph, journal article, or conference presentation; rather, it may be embodied in film, drama, poetry, novels, pictorial displays, music,
  and so forth. An important corollary to this proposition is the assumption that the ethnographer is an ‘author’ of the text – he or she figures in the story as much more than a simple, neutral reporter of objective ‘data.’ (See Clifford and Marcus, 1986, and Marcus and Fischer, 1986, two widely influential expositions of the postmodernist position.)
• There is a shift in emphasis away from discerning patterns of determination and causality and toward the explication of meaning, which requires a process of
• The study of any one culture, society, or any other such phenomenon is essen­tially relativistic – the forces that shape that phenomenon are distinctively dif­ferent from those that produce others, such that generalizations about social and cultural process are bound to be misleading.

Source: Angrosino Michael (2008), Doing Ethnographic and Observational Research, SAGE Publications Ltd; 1st edition.

Despite this diversity of positions from which ethnographers may derive, we may still highlight a few important features that link the many and varied approaches:

• A search for patterns proceeds from the careful observations of lived behavior and from detailed interviews with people in the community under study. When ethnographers speak about ‘culture’ or ‘society’ or ‘community’, it is important to keep in mind that they are speaking in terms that are generalized abstractions based on numerous bits of data in ways that make sense to the ethnographer who has a global overview of the social or cultural whole that people living in it may lack.
• Ethnographers must pay careful attention to the process of field research. Attention must always be paid to the ways in which one gains entry to the field site, establishes rapport with the people living there, and comes to be a participating member of that group.

1. Definitions

So at this point we can say that

Although developed as a way of studying small-scale, non-literate, traditional societies and of reconstructing their cultural traditions, ethnography is now prac­ticed in all sorts of social settings. In whatever setting,

Ethnographers collect data about the lived human experience in order to discern predictable patterns rather than to describe every conceivable instance of inter­action or production.

Ethnography is conducted on-site and the ethnographer is, as much as possible, a subjective participant in the lives of those under study, as well as an objective observer of those lives.

2. Ethnography as method

The ethnographic method is different from other ways of conducting social science research.

• It is field-based (conducted in the settings in which real people actually live, rather than in laboratories where the researcher controls the elements of the behaviors to be observed or measured).
• It is personalized (conducted by researchers who are in day-to-day, face-to- face contact with the people they are studying and who are thus both partici­pants in and observers of the lives under study).
• It is multifactorial (conducted through the use of two or more data collection tech­niques – which may be qualitative or quantitative in nature – in order to triangu­late on a conclusion, which may be said to be strengthened by the multiple ways in which it was reached; see also Flick, 2007b, for a discussion of this issue).
• It requires a long-term commitment (i.e. it is conducted by researchers who intend to interact with the people they are studying for an extended period of time – although the exact time frame may vary anywhere from several weeks to a year or more).
• It is inductive (conducted in such a way as to use an accumulation of descrip­tive detail to build toward general patterns or explanatory theories rather than structured to test hypotheses derived from existing theories or models).
• It is dialogic (conducted by researchers whose conclusions and interpretations can be commented upon by those under study even as they are being formed).
• It is holistic (conducted so as to yield the fullest possible portrait of the group under study).

3. Ethnography as product

The results of some forms of ethnographic data collection may be reducible to tables, graphs, or charts, but on the whole the finished ethnographic report takes the form of a narrative, a kind of extended story whose main goal is to draw the reader into a vicarious experience of the community in which the ethnographer has lived and interacted. The most common form of narrative is rendered in prose, in which case it often borrows (consciously or not) some of the literary techniques common to storytelling of any kind. (If the ethnographer makes the choice to tell the story in forms other than prose, then the resulting ‘narrative’ will be similarly influenced by the artistic conventions of visual art, dance, film, or whatever.)

There are many different ways in which an ethnographer can tell a story, three categories of which seem to be most common:

• Stories told in a realistic mode are de-personalized, objectively rendered por­traits provided by an emotionally neutral analyst – even if he or she was an emotionally engaged participant during the conduct of the research itself.
• Stories told in a confessional mode are those in which the ethnographer becomes a central player and the story of the community under study is explic­itly told through his or her particular viewpoint.
• Stories told in an impressionistic mode openly embrace literary – or other appropriately artistic – devices, such as the use of dialogue, elaborate charac­ter sketches, evocative descriptions of landscape or decor, flashback or flash- forward narrative structure, use of metaphors). (See van Maanen, 1988, for the classic exposition of these and other ‘tales’ of fieldwork.)

Regardless of the format of the narrative, any ethnographic report must some­how include several key points if it is to serve the purposes of science as well as of literature or art:

• First, there should be an introduction in which the reader’s attention is cap­tured and in which the researcher explains why his or her study has analytical value.
• Then there can be a setting of the scene in which the researcher describes the setting of the research and explains the ways in which he or she went about collecting data in that setting; many authors use the term thick description to indicate the way in which the scene is depicted (although the reader is urged to be cautious as this term is also used in various other ways that depart from our discussion in this section) – ‘thick description’ is the presentation of details, context, emotions, and the nuances of social relationships in order to evoke the ‘feeling’ of a scene and not just its surface attributes. (See Geertz, 1973, for the classic treatment of this issue and an elaboration of its ramifica­tions for the conduct of ethnographic research.)
• Next comes an analysis in which the researcher draws the numerous descrip­tive details into a coherent set of social/cultural patterns that help the reader make sense of the people and their community, and that link this particular ethno­graphic study to those produced from other, somewhat similar communities.

• Finally, there is a conclusion in which the researcher summarizes the main points and suggests the contributions of this study to the wider body of knowledge.

Source: Angrosino Michael (2008), Doing Ethnographic and Observational Research, SAGE Publications Ltd; 1st edition.

It is certainly possible to use data collection techniques that are typical of ethno­graphic research (see Chapter 4) in ways that do not involve participant observa­tion. For example, it may be more efficient in some cases to ask participants to write out (or tape record) their own autobiographies, rather than have those life stories collected by an on-site interviewer. But this book will be mainly con­cerned with those situations in which ethnographic method and product are asso­ciated with participant observation in the field setting.

In non-participant ethnography, the only thing that really matters is that prospec­tive participants recognize the researcher as a legitimate scholar who has taken the necessary ethical precautions in structuring his or her research. Their willingness to participate is thus a kind of business arrangement. The researcher relates to them strictly as a researcher. But in participant observation, the people of the study com­munity agree to the presence of the researcher among them as a neighbor and friend who also happens to be a researcher. The participant observer must thus make the effort to be acceptable as a person (which will mean different things in terms of behavior, living arrangements, and sometimes even appearance in different cultures) and not simply reputable as a scientist. He or she must thus adopt a style that is agreeable to most of the people among whom he or she proposes to live. As such, the participant observer cannot hope to control all the elements of research; he or she is dependent on the goodwill of the community (sometimes in a very literal sense, if it is a community in which the basic resources for living are scarce) and must make a tacit agreement to ‘go with the flow’, even if it doesn’t work out according to a carefully prepared research design. As an acceptable neighbor and friend, the partic­ipant observer can go about the business of collecting data. But for our purposes in this book, remember that participant observation is not itself a ‘method’ of research – it is the behavioral context out of which an ethnographer uses defined techniques to collect data.

Source: Angrosino Michael (2008), Doing Ethnographic and Observational Research, SAGE Publications Ltd; 1st edition.

1. Ethnographic methods: a general statement of utility

As noted in the previous chapter, ethnographic methods have been adopted by scholars from many academic disciplines and professional fields. There are, however, several characteristics that are typical of the situations that lend them­selves to ethnographic research, regardless of discipline.

2. Illustrative ethnographic case studies

Throughout this book, two of the author’s own field research projects will be used to illustrate major points. This material is offered as illustrative only, not as a model to be followed exactly. The two projects are meant only to help concretize otherwise abstract concepts. The author is a cultural anthropologist and so the projects tend to reflect an anthropological take on ethnographic research; readers from different disciplinary traditions will adapt the procedures according to the standards of their particular field of study.

2.1. The Trinidad Project

This project was conducted in a setting fairly typical of traditional cultural anthropology: a relatively well-bounded community with a strong self-image (and recognized as a definite community by outsiders) in a setting outside the United States. Since the early 1970s the author has been studying the descen­dants of people from India who were brought to various parts of the British Empire under a system of ‘indenture’ following the official end of slavery. Indentured laborers were not technically enslaved since the period of their bondage was limited by contract. After serving out their bonds, the laborers were free to leave the site of employment. During the period of the bond, however, conditions for the laborers were virtually identical with those that obtained dur­ing slavery. Although the Indians were in theory free to return to India, very few of them did so; the cost of the return passage was too great for many of them, and others believed that having crossed ‘dark water’ they had lost the traditional ties to the village system back home – they had, in effect, become ritually impure. So the vast majority of them remained in the areas in which they had been inden­tured. The author’s particular interest has been in the West Indies, most specifi­cally the island of Trinidad. Indians were brought to Trinidad to work on the sugar plantations. The Trinidad indenture lasted from 1837 through 1917. Descendants of the indentured Indians now constitute at least half the population of modem Trinidad; until very recently they have remained a largely agrarian population cut off from the island nation’s political and economic mainstream. (See Angrosino, 1974, for a full account of the Trinidad project.)

2.2. The deinstitutionalization project

This study was conducted in a community closer to home. The author became inter­ested in the situation of people with chronic mental illness and mental retardation who had been ‘deinstitutionalized’ beginning in the 1970s when advances in psychiatric medicine made it possible to treat their symptoms outside of hospitals. The deinstitutionalization movement had motives that were both humanitarian (allowing people to live in the community free from the rigors of institutional con­finement) and economic (treating people on a case-by-case basis in the community was cheaper than ‘warehousing’ them for life). Some of the people affected by dein­stitutionalization have made an adequate adjustment to life beyond the hospital, although others have fallen through the cracks in the complex health and human services systems and form the core of a homeless population visible in most major population centers. The author’s research was centered on an agency in Florida that served a ‘dually diagnosed’ clientele – people with both severe mental illness and mental retardation – providing educational, vocational, and residential services. (See Angrosino, 1998, for a full account of this research project.)

Source: Angrosino Michael (2008), Doing Ethnographic and Observational Research, SAGE Publications Ltd; 1st edition.

1. Ethnographic research is used to define a research problem

Certain well-established research topics attract the researcher because of their extensive bodies of associated literature, which make it possible to formulate rea­sonable working hypotheses that can then be tested using focused data collection tools. Other topics, by contrast, are more amorphous and need to be studied on the ground, as it were, before suitable hypotheses can be devised. It is for these latter topics that ethnographic methods are particularly well suited.

For example, in the Trinidad project, the Indian indenture in various parts of the old British Empire had been extensively studied by historians, economists, political scientists, sociologists, and social psychologists, as well as cultural anthropologists. Especially with regard to the West Indies, however, there had been at the time I began my research a tendency to focus on the most isolated and culturally traditional Indian communities. But Trinidad, with a modern industrial sector linked to the global petrochemical economy, provided many potential oppor­tunities for Indians to break out of their traditional isolation. And indeed many of them had done so. Younger people were taking jobs in the non-agricultural sector, getting higher education, and living in homes outside the rural villages. But from what I had heard before doing field research of my own, I knew that the sense of Indian community identity remained very strong. What was going on in this transitional society? In what ways did Indians themselves understand the dynamic of living modern lives and yet defining themselves in terms of cultural tradition?

In the deinstitutionalization project, people who are mentally challenged have obvious difficulties when it comes to negotiating the complexities of everyday life. Such scholarly literature as existed at the beginning of the deinstitutional­ization process suggested that those who made it outside the hospital were those who either established or otherwise fell into the care of agencies providing comprehensive ‘case management’ services or of compassionate individual bene­factors. There seemed to be no choice: either give up the promised freedoms of deinstitutionalization in order to secure the protection of a benevolent other, or fail to cope and become a hopeless, homeless vagrant. But did people in this situation really see things in such either/or terms, or had they found other ways in which they could cope?

In both these research projects, the main question asked by the researcher was: ‘What does it feel like to be [a modern-day Trinidad Indian; deinstitutionalized adult with mental challenges]?’ This is obviously a less clear-cut question than one that could be answered with demographic statistics (‘How many people were brought to Trinidad during the indenture?’ ‘What percentage of the modern pop­ulation of Trinidad is Indian, and where on the island do they live?’) or epidemi­ological data (‘How many people are diagnosed with severe mental illness?’ ‘What are the main behavioral symptoms associated with mental retardation?’) Answering it required the researcher to participate in the lived experience of the people under study, and not simply to observe it from a detached position.

2. Ethnographic research is used to define a problem that cannot immediately be expressed in ‘If X, then Y terms and that seems to result in behaviors that would not have been predicted by the existing literature

Standard quantitative research is predicated on the assumption that problems can best be studied if they can be stated in terms of a predictable relationship: dependent variables (factors that change) when an independent variable (a factor that seems to be a predisposing condition) is present. But sometimes, real-life problems are difficult to fit into such a testable format, at least at first.

For example, there seemed to be an unusually high rate of alcoholism among the Trinidad Indians, a fact noted with some surprise in the literature. The tradi­tional religions of the indentured Indians (Hinduism and Islam), as well as the version of Christianity offered to them by missionaries during the colonial period, were strongly anti-drink. Why, then had the Indians – who professed to be so traditional in their cultural affiliations – become problem drinkers? There were possibly historical factors: some historians suggested that the indentured planta­tion laborers were paid in rum – a main product of the sugar estates in that era. There were also possible explanations of a psychological nature: a disenfran­chised minority tends to turn to self-destructive behaviors when its culture is threatened. There were certainly economic factors at play: poor people seek the solace of oblivion in drink or drugs in order to forget the hopelessness of their condition. But the Trinidad Indians were not disenfranchised in the same way that Native Americans, for example, had been – their alienation from the political process had for a long time been a matter of their own choice, not the result of overt discrimination. And their poverty, while marked in contrast to conditions in the First World, was not significantly worse than anyone else’s in the West Indies. It was clear that the only way to sort out the apparent contradiction of Indian alco­holism was to observe it in action and to reconstruct the history of the Indians’ association with alcohol as they themselves understood it.

In a similar way, the adaptation of people with mental challenges (particularly those with mental retardation) to life outside the hospital has been shadowed by sexual misadventure. People with mental retardation have traditionally been viewed as naive innocents who, lacking ordinary self-control mechanisms, explode into sexual depravity at the least provocation. As such, the traditional response of caregivers has been to withhold sexual information – sexuality train­ing has rarely been part of the ‘habilitation’ plans along with such matters as how to make change, tell time, or read a bus schedule. But far from keeping the peo­ple in a state of innocence, such ignorance only leads to confusion, sometimes with disastrous consequences. So are people with mental retardation condemned to live as asexual beings (although physical castration or enforced sterilization is no longer a legally approved option)? Is there a way to integrate sexuality into the coping strategies of deinstitutionalized adults? Again, the answers could only come through experiencing life as the people themselves see it, not by formulat­ing judgments based on value-neutral clinical data.

3. Ethnographic research is used to identify participants in a social setting

Even when researchers set out to study a community that is considered to be well known and understood, they must realize that the dynamic of change leads to the inclusion of heretofore unacknowledged participants in the network of social interaction.

For example, the overseas Indian community was thought to revolve around the family, which, in traditional Indian culture, was a ‘joint’ organization (i.e. composed of a group of brothers, their wives and children sharing a common household with their father, the family patriarch). The joint family did not, as it happened, survive the indenture period. The family is still in fact central to Indian social organization in Trinidad, but the identification of who is and is not considered ‘family’, and the relationships among those members, are not what they once were. Descriptive ethnography in which the contemporary family organization was ‘mapped’ in detail could help clarify this situation.

The situation of deinstitutionalized adults with mental retardation was also often rendered in terms of expectations and stereotypes – often depicted as dependent clients and powerful service providers and/or caregivers. This rela­tionship is true up to a point. But for adults with mental challenges who also live in non-institutional communities, there are other elements in the social network to consider. What other people play important roles in the lives of those with mental challenges? What is the nature of their interaction? Again, detailed ethno­graphic description helped sort things out.

4. Ethnographic research is used to document a process

Unlike a clear-cut statistical relationship, a process is composed of numerous and ever-shifting elements. Much of life as it is really lived (as opposed to the way it can be controlled in clinical or laboratory research settings) is a matter of dynamic process.

For example, at the time of my initial field study, the main way in which the alcoholism of the Trinidad Indians was dealt with involved membership in Alcoholics Anonymous. AA has long been a reasonably successful method for helping alcoholics cope with their disease, but it was developed in the United States and grew out of a strongly Christian world-view. Why was it working among Hindu and Muslim Indians in the very different social world of Trinidad? An ethnographic study of AA in Trinidad was needed in order to document the process of recovery; how, in effect, did the Trinidad Indians take the standard ele­ments of AA and shape them to fit their own culture and the particularities of their own situation?

The adaptation of deinstitutionalized adults to the community is clearly more than a matter of signing official release papers and sending people on their way. By following some people as they moved from custodial care to independent liv­ing, it became clear that adaptation is a complex process and one that is managed with varying degrees of success. The ability of people to hook up with formal agency supports (e.g. medical, educational, vocational, transportation, residential services) was always mediated by their ability to find informal support systems composed in various ways of peers, neighbors, family, and friends.

5. Ethnographic research is used to design setting-appropriate measures

Ethnographers are not at all opposed to the use of quantitative measures, but they do insist that such measures grow out of the local experience. While measures thus modified are often based on recognized, reputable standardized tests (so that they are more useful for purposes of comparison), it is important that they be sensitive to local conditions. In some cases, such sensitivity is a matter of modi­fying content (e.g. some topics such as sexual behavior are freely discussed in some cultures but are taboo in others). In other cases, it may require translating the measurement instrument into language that can be understood by study participants. (Sometimes an actual other language is involved if research is being conducted in a non-English-speaking place. Or it may mean translating concepts from complex academic jargon into terms commonly used by non-scientists.) In still other cases, modification may require accommodations in the way in which the measurement instrument is administered. (For example, in some cultures, a male researcher would not be allowed to interview a female research participant, espe­cially about personal matters, without the presence of some sort of chaperone.)

Often in quantitative research, standardized instruments are administered at the beginning of a project as they provide a lot of precise and objective data that can be used to refine working hypotheses. But in ethnographic research, the adminis­tration of such instruments is best reserved to a later part of the research process so as to give the researcher some time to learn enough about the people and their community to present the measurement instrument in ways that are considered both reasonable and acceptable.

In both the Trinidad and the deinstitutionalization research, I made use of stan­dardized measures. In the former, I used the Health Opinion Survey (HOS), designed by medical researchers to measure levels of perceived psychosocial stress in a community. The HOS was originally used to test the correlation between stress and psychiatric disorder. I used it to see if there was a link between stress and alcoholism. The main modification was administrative. I had learned through my participant observation in the community that Indians considered alcoholism to be a social disease rather than an individual failing because they were most concerned with its negative impact on family and community rela­tions. As such, they preferred to talk about their personal problems in groups, rather than in individual encounters. So I administered the HOS at AA meetings or social gatherings where the respondents felt free to discuss their responses with one another before marking them on the paper. This departure from accepted pro­cedure certainly compromised the comparative value of the resulting data, but it made for unexpectedly rich results; a perspective on what people perceived to be stressful that emerged from this group discussion was far more important in this community-oriented society than the ‘pure’ responses of many individual respon­dents in a clinical setting ever could have been.

Once I had detected the concern with sexuality among deinstitutionalized peo­ple with mental challenges, I wanted to survey my population to see how much they actually knew about sex. Working with a colleague who was a psychothera­pist, I came up with a diagnostic checklist that assessed both objective sexual information (e.g. anatomical details) and subjective attitudes about sexuality and relationships. Since the caregivers were in most cases very uncomfortable with discussions of this topic, it would have been disastrous to have barged in with a ready-made measurement instrument. Taking the time to develop one that reflected what I had already learned from interacting with the people (and that also relied on the trust I had established with the participants) meant that the ulti­mate results were meaningful to the particular people in the group I was study­ing. Like the Trinidad Indians, the deinstitutionalized adults found it very helpful to discuss their responses with one another; it was very important for them to have something that had the character of an ordinary conversation, rather than yet another clinical ‘test’ that put them as individuals on the spot.

Source: Angrosino Michael (2008), Doing Ethnographic and Observational Research, SAGE Publications Ltd; 1st edition.

Ethnographic research can be done wherever people interact in ‘natural’ group settings. Bringing people together for a specific purpose in controlled laboratory settings is a valid technique for experimental research, but it is not ethnographic. True ethnography relies on the ability of a researcher to interact with and observe people as they essentially go about their everyday lives. As noted in Chapter 1, ethnography was developed for use in small-scale, culturally isolated communi­ties. It later expanded for use in well-defined enclave communities (defined by race, ethnicity, age, social class, and so on) within larger societies. In our own time it has expanded still further to encompass ‘communities of interest’ (groups of people who share some common factor – e.g. they are all college-educated women diagnosed as HIV-positive – even if they do not regularly interact with one another) and even ‘virtual communities’ (formed in ‘cyberspace’ rather than in traditional geographic space).

Source: Angrosino Michael (2008), Doing Ethnographic and Observational Research, SAGE Publications Ltd; 1st edition.

It is often said that the one piece of equipment that an ethnographic researcher ultimately relies on is him or herself. It is all very well to enter the field fully loaded with cameras, tape recorders, laptop computers, and so on. But in the last analysis, participant observation means that you as a researcher are interacting on a daily basis with the people being studied. It is therefore critically important for you to begin with an understanding of yourself. What kind of person are you? What types of situations do you find congenial, and which would be abhorrent? Some things are obvious: if you are highly sensitive to cold, then choosing to do fieldwork among the Inuit in northern Alaska is probably a bad idea, even if you

find Inuit culture fascinating to read about. Other factors are less obvious: if you are a person who greatly values privacy, then you might do well to select a study community in which the people recognize and respect that same value. It is, of course, possible for most people to adapt to most conditions. But given the lim­ited amount of time and financial resources that most of us have at our disposal, why not choose to do research under circumstances in which you have at least a fighting chance of fitting in? If the process of forcing yourself to adapt takes up more time and effort than the process of collecting data about the community you are studying, then participant observation is just not serving its intended purpose.

It is therefore important that you begin with a candid assessment of yourself. Check especially the following points:

• your emotional and attitudinal state;
• your physical and mental health (and the health of anyone you may be tak­ing with you to the field);
• your areas of competence and incompetence;
• your ability to set aside preconceptions about people, behaviors, or social and political situations.

Some personal factors are under your control and you can modify them so that you can fit into a study community. Your hairstyle, choice of jewelry or bodily adornments, clothing, or tone of voice can all be adjusted if need be. On the other hand, there are things we can’t do much about: our gender, our relative age, our perceived racial or ethnic category. If such distinctions are important in the study community, then you may need to think twice about inserting yourself into that culture. You may think that people in the community are wrong in their approach to gender or racial relations, but remember that your main job is that of a researcher, not a social reformer or a missionary. (Even though ‘critical’ ethnog­raphers, discussed in an earlier chapter, do consider themselves to be social reformers, they typically become advocates for positions held by the communi­ties with which they become identified. They do not arrive in a community with their own agenda, which they then seek to impose on the people they study.) In sum, do not choose a field site in which you become the object of discussion and contention.

Source: Angrosino Michael (2008), Doing Ethnographic and Observational Research, SAGE Publications Ltd; 1st edition.

Having subjected yourself to a thorough personal review, you can now apply more objective criteria in deciding where you want to do your research. Some of those objective criteria are scholarly in nature, others purely pragmatic. The fol­lowing pointers may be useful.

1. Select a site in which the scholarly issue you are exploring is most likely to be seen in a reasonably clear fashion

You will develop a sense of the issue to be studied in a number of ways. Your research focus may be:

• a direct assignment by your instructor;
• a follow-up to a study conducted by a reputable researcher;
• an exploration of an issue that is currently in the news;
• an outgrowth of your reading of the scholarly literature – you may have iden­tified a gap in what we think we know about a particular issue;
• the result of personal experience and your desire to gather wider information about something that affects you directly;
• an intention to work for a social or political cause by collecting information that might support that position.

Studying what happens to the traditional culture of an immigrant community such as that of the Indians of the indenture requires participant observation in an over­seas Indian community that is neither too traditional nor already too assimilated. Trinidad, at the time I began my study, was just such a place.

Studying the effects of deinstitutionalization on adults with mental challenges required selecting an urban site in which such people were likely to congregate so as to find jobs, housing, and so forth. A rural community where only a single person with chronic mental illness lived, sheltered by a protective family, would not have been a reasonable choice.

2. Select a site that is comparable to others that have been studied by other researchers, but not one that has itself been over-studied

There is an ancient joke among anthropologists to the effect that the typical Navajo family consists of a mother, a father, three children, and an anthropologist. Humorous exaggeration aside, it is undeniably true that some people and places have been stud­ied with great frequency. Communities unfortunate enough to exist in proximity to a university campus may well feel that they have been selected as research sites for their convenience almost to the point of exploitation. There is a limit to the hospitality of even the best-intentioned people. By the same token, we should not think that every research project has to begin by reinventing the wheel. Unless you have the resources to take yourself off to the highlands of New Guinea at the drop of a hat, you are most likely going to end up doing fieldwork in a community fairly close to home that has been studied before. In that case, just try to make sure that researchers are still wel­come and that your own research interests are sufficiently different so that people don’t feel moved to exclaim, ‘Oh no! I already answered that question a dozen times!’

When I first conducted fieldwork on overseas Indians, there were a few available ethnographic reports on communities in Trinidad. But all had been con­ducted in isolated rural villages. I opted to base myself in a village that was still largely agrarian, but on one of the main roads with easy access to the sort of ‘modern’ employment (such as at a major oil refinery) that was attracting the young people of the village.

My deinstitutionalization study was inspired by research conducted in California, although I worked mainly in Florida, Tennessee, and Indiana – com­parable situations, but with their own distinctive social and political attributes.

3. Select a site with a minimum of ‘gatekeeping’ obstacles

Routine entry requirements such as visas, vaccination certificates, or letters of introduction from local worthies usually pose no problem. But sometimes there are more troublesome matters that need to be taken care of. A background check by law enforcement officials might be necessary, particularly if you want to work in a community with a notable crime problem. Some communities that are riven by factions might require you to get permission from every conceivable interest group. Communities in authoritarian, governmentally centralized political soci­eties might be unwilling to take the responsibility for allowing a researcher to enter without getting clearance from many levels of a bureaucratic hierarchy. Only you can decide when the process of gaining entry becomes too much of a hassle for you.

4. Select a site in which you will not be more of a burden than you are worth to the community

Remember that as a participant observer you may be living in the community you are studying; even if you are studying a place that allows you to go to your own home at the end of the day, you may be expected to be working (for pay or as a volunteer as the case may be) or in other ways drawing on the resources of the community. You will want to make sure that you can provide for your own needs as much as possible. People are often incredibly hospitable and willing to put themselves out for strangers. But keep in mind that nobody really appreciates a freeloader. Pay particular attention to the drawing-up of a realistic budget that takes resources of both finances and time very carefully into account. If you plan to bring your spouse and/or children to the field with you, be sure to calculate their expenses as well. If you are doing research as part of a team, consider the potential burden the community will have to bear in providing room and board to several strangers at the same time.

By the same token, make sure that you select a site in which you can adopt a role that allows for optimal participant observation. You will want to be very cautious about selecting a site in which you will be expected to be either too much of a participant or kept at arm’s length.

When I first went to Trinidad to conduct research, I was a boarder in the house of a family whose oldest son had recently moved away to work in Canada. They found it pleasant to have another young man on the premises and I found it invaluable to be part of a family group – an essential prerequisite to interacting with others in an Indian cultural context. Indians are very often identified in terms of the families with which they are affiliated.

My research among deinstitutionalized adults was facilitated by my becom­ing a classroom volunteer at a habilitation program that served ‘dually diagnosed’ clients. As such, I could come and go in a natural fashion, since I had a recog­nized role to play; but at the same time I was not officially ‘staff’, so the clients felt relatively comfortable sharing their private feelings with me.

Source: Angrosino Michael (2008), Doing Ethnographic and Observational Research, SAGE Publications Ltd; 1st edition.