1

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

3

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

4

• 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

5

• “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

6

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

7

…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.