Participant observation as style and context

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.