participant observation, documents, visual methods...
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Participant observation,documents, visual methods
Ilpo KoskinenProf., Dr.Soc.Sci. (sociology)
University of Art and Design Helsinki
Participant Observation
Observation and ParticipantObservation
• 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, informalgroups and communities
2
• In the field– A Main Instrument: The research diary
• the single most crucial thing in observationalstudies 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 be4 years
– you have to write notes that are clear enough to beintelligible 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, programand drinking = a party);
• time (action over time)• participants’ motivations• mood
• How to Write– be simple, concrete,
use your "naive"concepts
– that is, don't writethings 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 aspossible intocomplete sentences
• (3) expand thesenotes later into adiary
• Additionalelements in thediary– Ideas, theories and
other kinds ofhunches
– Personal notes
• Sampling– You can’t observe
everything at once– What interests
observers isdetermined not justby their interest, butalso by their current"sampling" scheme!
– typically samplingproceeds fromsimple to complex
– first observations aretypically 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 fieldwork:
– these can vary from friendships to consulting
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Debates
• Recently, there have been severaldebate about participant observation– cultural biases. Is ethnography tourism?
Writing compelling but authorative stories -whose “voice” should count?
– also, there are new, typically subjectivewriting conventions
– however, these are marginal phenomenoneven 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, notjust 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 morethan, say, ordinary people
• decision-making: many documents show theworld 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
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• In searching documents, common-sense helps– institutional and personal documents differ
in style, content, and storage– public and secret documents further divide
documents
Criticism of Sources
• Before building an interpretation onsome document, go through thisprocedure– search the original document, the one
closest to the object of interest– study its content before you trust it:
• contradictions, illogical features, too muchlogic;
• the writer’s ability and motives to tell the “truth”
Oral history
• Historical memory exists not just indocuments, 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 areordered tells about an organization’s values
• see Silverman, David, Interpreting QualitativeData, which is a good source for textualanalysis
Other methods
Structure
• 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
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• “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!
questions?
Appendix: Transcription• 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
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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 theservice 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 almostchoked me. After that...
• Level 3: ”In verbatim”– Perhaps the most typical accuracy is this:
”One fellow wanted to sleep quite a bit. I talkedto him two or three times and told him finallythat 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 reviewmeeting.
• The transcript has lots of detail, for example (.)means a pause of 0.1 seconds and (h) alaughter token w(h)(h)it(h)in a w(h)ord
• This kind of accuracy is necessary if you studyinteraction, but not elsewhere
684 R Joku, (.) joku saattaa ostaa sen pelkästään685 nimen per#usteella.#686 (0.3)687 V °Sait tulee [vielä ( )° ]688 L [Pettyäks(h)(h)e]e(h)n689 L si(h)t[t(h)e s(h)is(h)/ÄL[TÖÖN VAI]690 V [$↑HHh,$ [/HOH HOH] HA691 V [HA HA [H A H hah\]692 L [HEH HEH[H E H ] HEH\][.hhhh693 I? [°$hm hm$° ] [694 R [/E:i, (.) sehän695 on hy\vä.696 L $°$hh hm$°
01 A …We’d go over to Mount Vernon? And play a02 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--------------------------04 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 dumpB’s gaze _____________________________,,,,,,,,,/,,,,,,,,,B’s body nod nod
A’s gaze06 compared to it.
B’s gaze ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,B’s body nod nod
Here the transcript covers also body positions and gaze directions
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…this was scare tactics...
• Don’t overtranscribe!– It takes about 75 min to transcribe an hour
of tape at level 1, but easily 40-60 hours inlevel 4
• not just costs are an issue, but also utility: youcan make sense of very exact transcripts only ifyou are a conversation analyst
questions?
Sources
Participant ObservationDuneier, Mitchell 1992. Slim’s Table. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press.Hammersley, Martyn ja Paul Atkinson 1995. Ethnography:Principles in Practice. London: Routledge.Gold, Raymond 1958. Rules of Sociological FieldObsevations. Social Forces 36: 217-223.
History (this is a Nordic example; any method book works)Dahl, Ottar 1967. Grunntrekk i historieforskningensmetodelaere. Universitetsforlaget. (In Norwegian)Thompson, Paul 2000. 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 1999. Cultural Probes.Interactions 6 (1), Jan-Feb: pp. 21—29.
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