Research Methods Ch. 12,13,14

Focusing

after the break, you will have a better idea of exactly what kinda of data you are lacking, and your sense of problem will also come more sharply into focus

Interviews w/ informants produce acres notes, especially....

if you use a recorder and later write down large chunks of what people say or even transcribe the interviews completely

Reactivity

people changing their behavior when they know that they are being studied

Participatory mapping

people draw maps of their villages and locate key places on the maps

Which Direct observation method presents the most ethical problems

unobtrusive, nonreactive observation

Participant Observation

"immersing yourself in a culture and learning to remove yourself every day from the immersion so you can intellectualize what you've seen and heard, put it into perspective, and write about it convincingly" - when its done right, PO turns fieldworkers into instruments of data collection and data analysis

Field Jottings

"scratch notes" - will provide you with the trigger you need to recall a lot of details that you don't have time to write down while you're observing events or listening to an informant. - key words

Pros of Trace Studies

** most important advantage - non reactive, so as long as the people you are studying are kept in the dark about what you are doing - yield enormous amounts amount of data that can be standardized, quantified, and compared across groups and over time - traces reflect many behaviors more accurately than informant reports of those behaviors

The Garbage Project (1973 by archeologist William Rathje at University of Arizona)

- Rathje and associates studied consumer behavior patterns in Tucson Arizona, by analyzing the garbage from a representative sample of residents. great effort at applying trace measures.

Their meaning of the word "code" is:

- a measurement device ex. LO-PAIN, MID-PAIN, HI-PAIN - using codes for more than nominal measurement

Interaction process analysis (p 312)

- a system developed 60 years ago by Robert F. Bales in his research on communications in small groups - Bales coding schemes continues to be used in the study of classrooms, work teams, in any situation where people interact with one another - one of the best thing about this system is that any act of communication can be identified as being one of those 12 categories and they are recognized in many cultures around the world

Exhaustion, the Second break and Frantic Activity

- after 7/8 months some participant observers start to think they have exhausted their informants, both literally and figuratively - calls for a good second break - researchers realize they are running out of time and sends investigators into a frenetic burst of activity

Descriptive Notes

- are the meat and potatoes of fieldwork - most notes are descriptive and from two sources: watching and listening - try to capture in field notes the details of the behavior and the environment. try to get down "whats going on" - the best way to learn to write descriptive notes is to practice doing it with others who are also trying to learn

Behavior Trace Studies

- behavioral archeology (study of historic or prehistoric peoples behaviors and their cultures behaviors)

3 Types of Observations/Field work

- complete participant - participant observer - complete observer

methodological notes

- deal with technique in collecting data - also about your own growth as an instrument of data collection example: arrived in greece, invited to dinner around 7 pm - arrived 7 15 to be politely late but host was still in bath - methodological note for the occasion is that he should not show up for dinner before 8 pm in future

Time Sampling (instantaneous spot sampling)

- developed in behavioral psychology in the 1920s and is used in ethology today

Cons of Trace Studies

- distorted factors - "garbage disposal correction factor" - had to develop correction factors for all of the biases - can raise ethical problems

Leaving the field

- don't neglect this part - let people know that you are leaving and tell them how much you appreciate their help - the ritual of leaving a place in a culturally appropriate way will make it possible for you to go back and even send others

initial contact

- during initial contact period, many long-term fieldworkers report experiencing a kind of euphoria as they begin to move about in a new culture

"Use codes for places and informant names" the word "code" means an:

- encryption device - the object is to hide information, not dispense it

The difference between CM and Spot Sampling is analogous to the difference between

- ethnography and survey research - with ethnography, you get information about process; - with survey research, you get data that let you estimate parameters for a population - spot sampling is used in TA research precisely because the goal is to estimate parameters-- like how much time on average, women spend cooking or men spending throwing pots

Coding Field Notes

- first theres a delimiter (ex. $) that marks the beginning of each note -- this lets you pack all the notes togethers in one big file so a word processor or text analysis program knows where notes begin and end - next is a unique number that identifies the note in a continuing sequence, starting w/ 0001 - next is the date - then come some numbers that refer to theme codes (sometimes preceded location indicator) - at the end of the codes at the top of each field note, theres a cryptic indicator of the person to whom you attribute the information (unless based on observation)

"Code your notes for the themes you develop in your analysis", the word "code" means an:

- indexing device - a way to find your way back to the places in the text where anything about ________ is mentioned

Complete Participant

- involves deception - becoming a member of a group without letting on that you're there to do research

Complete Observer

- involves following people around and recording their behavior with little if any interaction - part of direct observation

The Log

- is a running account of how you plan to spend your time, how you actually spend your time and how much money you spent - a good log is the key to doing systematic fieldwork and to collecting both qualitative and quantitative data on systematic bias - kept in bound books of blank, lined pages - each day of fieldwork should be represented by a double page of the log (left page lists what you plan to do, right page will recount what you actually did)

ES offers two big advantages:

- it combines the power of random spot checks with the relative ease of having people report their own behavior

Margaret Mead made clear the importance of gender as a variable in data collection - Gender has two consequences:

- it limits your access to certain information - it influences how you perceive others

4 types of field notes

- jottings - a diary - a log - field notes proper

Skills of a Participant Observer (8)

- learning the language - building explicit awareness - building memory - develop skill at being a novice (being someone who genuinely wants to learn a new culture) - building writing skills - hanging out (observing) - rapport (building trust that results in ordinary conversation and behavior in your presence) - Objectivity

Participant Observer

- most ethnographic research is based on PO - can be insiders who observe and record some aspects of life around them (observing participants) or they can be outsiders who participate in some aspects of life around them and record what they can (participating observer)

Six Culture Project

- most important comparative study of children - field researchers spent from 6-14 months in Okinawa, Kenya, Mexico, the Philippines, New England and India - observations only lasted 5 minutes because they were so intense, produced so much data and required so much concentration and effort that researchers would have become fatigued and lost a lot of data in longer sessions - investigators wrote out in clear sentences, everything they saw children doing during the observation periods - also recorded data about the physical environment and others with whom children were interacting with

Experience Sampling (ES)

- people respond at random times during a day or a week to questions about what they're doing, or who they're with, or what they're feeling at the moments

The Diary

- personal - its a place where you can run and hide when things get tough - absolutely need in any ethnography project - a diary chronicles how you feel and how you perceive your relations with others around you - during data analysis your diary will become an important professional document - it will give you information that will help you interpret your field notes and will make you more aware of your personal bias

Using Video for Continuous Monitoring

- recording behavior on film or video lets several analysts study the behavior stream and decided at leisure how to code it - it also makes your data available for coding by others, now and in the future

Archival Research (text): 4

- recoverable information about human thought and behavior. - This can include writings, artifacts, images, behaviors, or events. It all comes to us in raw qualitative form - nonreactive -- whether studying archival records of birth, migrations, visits to a hospital, etc -- people can't change their behavior after the fact - can be useful in studying cultural processes through time

discovering the obvious

- researchers often settle into collecting data on a more or less systematic bias - this causes a sense of discovery, where you feel as if informants are finally letting you in on the "good stuff" about their culture - much of this "good stuff" is commonplace

two problems in TA research

- sampling - measurement

Field notes

- the faster you write up your observations, the more detail you can get done. more is better - 3 kinds of field notes

Coding Continuous Monitoring Data

- the idea is to record any instances of behavior that conform to the items in the scheme. - this allows you to see if your hunches are correct about conditions under which certain behaviors occur

Reactivity in TA Research

- the trick is to catch a glimpse of people in their natural activities before they see you coming on the scene -- before they have a chance to modify their behavior

Passive Deception

- uses no experimental manipulation of informants to get them to act a certain way

Direct observation v. Indirect observation

- watching people and recording their behavior on the spot - the archeology of human behavior

5 Questions to ask when drawing a sample for a TA study:

- who do I watch? - where do I go to watch them? - when do I go there? - how often do I go there? - how long do I spend watch people when i get there?

Analytic Notes

- will write up fewer analytic notes than any other kind - this is where you lay out your ideas about how you think the culture you are studying is organized - are the product of a lot of time and effort and may go on for several pages - they are often the basis for published papers or for chapters in dissertations and books - will be the product of your understanding and that will come about through your organizing and working with descriptive and methodological notes over a period of time

Plan to spend 2-3 hours every working day of a participant observation study: (3)

- writing up field notes - working on your diary - coding interviews and notes

The Garbage Project findings:

- you can accurately estimate the population of an area by weighing only the plastic trash -squash is the favored baby food among Hispanics in the US - 35% of all food from chicken take-out restaurants is thrown away. - children generate as much plastic trash as adults do

2 big strategies for Direct Observation behavior

- you can be blatant about it and reactive (people know you are watching them and can modify their behavior because you are watching them) - you can be unobtrusive and nonreactive (you study peoples behaviors without their knowing it)

Continuous Monitoring (CM, focal follows)

- you watch a person, or group of people, and record their behavior as faithfully as possible - is widely used in assessing the quality of human interactions-- between, for example, adolescent girls and their mothers, workers and employees, police and civilians - is the core method of ethology - a mainstay in behavioral psychology for assessing anxieties and phobias - been used to study how people eat - how people use architectural space - is a staple method in the study of how hunters and fishermen make a living and how children learn to hunt and forage

2 most important methods for direct observation:

1. Continuous Monitoring 2. Spot Sampling

Traditions in Textual Analysis (5)

1. Hermeneutics (reading between the lines of the text) 2. Narrative and Performance Analysis (interpreting the memes and performance) 3. Discourse analysis (interactive effects like process tracing) 4. Content Analysis (counting to test hypotheses) 5. Schema, Grounded Theory, and Analytic Induction

5 reasons for insisting on Participant Observation in the conduct of scientific research about cultural groups

1. PO opens things up and make it possible to collect all kinds of data 2. reduces the problem of reactivity 3. helps you ask sensible questions, in the native language 4. gives you an intuitive understanding of what's going on in a culture and allows you to speak with confidence about the meaning of data 5. many research problems simply cannot be addressed adequately by anything except participant observation

2 Ways to lower Reactivity in Continuous Monitoring

1. Participant Observation - once you've built up rapport and trust in a field situation, people are less likely to change their behavior when you're around 2. training - you can't eliminate observer bias entirely, but lots of evidence shows that training helps make people better- more reliable and more accurate observers

Stages of Participant Observation (7)

1. initial contact 2. cultural shock 3. discovering the obvious 4. the break 5. focusing 6. exhaustion, the second break, frantic activity 7. leaving the field

3 kinds of field notes

1. methodological notes 2. descriptive notes 3. analytic notes

5 Rules to making an entry in participant observation fieldwork

1. there is no reason to select a site that is difficult to enter when equally good sites are available that are easy to enter 2. go into the field with plenty of written documentation about yourself and your project 3. don't try to wing it, unless you absolutely have to 4. think through in advance what you will say when ordinary people (not just gatekeepers) 5. spend time getting to know the physical and social layout of your field site

"becoming the phenomenon" you study is:

a participant observational strategy for penetrating to and gaining experience of a form of human life - an objective approach insofar as it results in the accurate, detailed description of the insiders' experience of life

Participatory transects

a technique that chambers borrowed from wildlife biology, you walk through an area systematically, with key informants, observing and asking for explanations of everything you see along the transect -

Direct observation is time consuming but random spot-checking of behavior is

a very cost-effective and productive way to use some of your time in any field project

The rule on sexual behavior in the field is this:

do nothing that you can't live with, both professionally and personally

Objectivity gets its biggest test in:

indigenous research -- studying your own culture pros: know the language, less likely to suffer from cultural shock cons: harder to recognize patterns that you live every day and you're likely to take a lot of things for granted that an outsider would pick up right away

culture shock

is an uncomfortable stress response and must be taken very seriously ** good responses at this stage is to do highly task-oriented work: making maps, taking censuses, doing household inventories and is to make clinical, methodological field notes about your feelings and responses in doing participant observation field work

disguised field observation:

is the ultimate in participant observation -- you join, or pretend to join a group and secretly record data about people in the group

Ethogram

list of behaviors, for a species being studied

In Time Allocation (TA) studies, which are based on time sampling, an:

observer appears at randomly selected places, and at randomly selected times, and records what people are doing when they are first seen - the idea behind TA is simple and appealing: if you sample a sufficiently large number of representative acts, you can use the percentage of times people are seen doing things (working, playing, resting, eating) as a proxy for the percentage of time they spend in those activities

Direct observation provides much more accurate results about behavior than do:

reports of behavior

result of Six culture project, Whiting and Whiting noted

that nurturance, responsibility, success, authority, and casual intimacy " are types of behavior that are differentially preferred by different cultures - concluded these values are apparently transmitted to the child before the age of six

The break

the mid-fieldwork break, which usually comes after 3 or 4 months, is a crucial part of the overall participant observation experience for long-term researchers - opportunity to get distance, both physical and emotional from the field site - allows you to put things into perspective about what you've got so far and what you still need

Proxemics

the use of different space - Edward Hall showed how people in different cultures used different "body language" to communicate, that is, they stand at different angles to one another, or at different distances when engaging in serious versus casual conversation