Hoon Lee i36009

 Participant Observation:
 What is it?
 How is it done?
 Advantages vs Disadvantages
 The ethics
 Case Study: Lugbara

 Participant observation is a qualitative method with roots in traditional ethnographic research, whose objective is to help researchers learn the perspectives held by study populations.
 Interested in both knowing the multiple diverse perspectives, and understanding the interplay among them

 How is it done?
 By observing and participating, to varying degrees, in the community’s daily activities
 Researchers make careful objective notes about what they see, recording all accounts and observations
 Information conversations and interaction are also important and are recorded.
 Detailed
 Information and messages delivered through mass media (tv, internet, radio) are also important and documenteddone?
 It takes place in community settings, or locations believed to be of importance or relevant to the research questions
 The method is distinctive because the researcher approaches participants in their own environment rather than having the participants come to the researcher.
 Tries to learn what life is like for an “insider” while remaining as an “outsider”

 Data obtained through participant observation serve as a check against participant’s subjective reporting of what they believe and do
 Useful for gaining knowledge and understand of the physical, social, cultural, and economic contexts which study participants live
 Relationships among people, contexts, ideas, norms and events
 Behavior and activities of people
 What they do, frequency and with whom.
 It enables to develop a familiarity with the cultural milieu – very invaluable
 Can only come from personal experience
 No substitute for witnessing or participating
 Can also uncover factors important to understanding unknowns when the project was first designed
 We many not ask the right questions
 Can help us not only understand data collected, but also design the right questions for understanding the phenomenon being studied.

Strengths
Allows for insight into contexts, relationships, behavior
Weaknesses
Time-consuming
Can provide information previously unknown to researchers that is crucial for project design, data collection, and interpretation of other data
Documentation relies on memory, personal discipline, and diligence of researcher
Requires conscious effort at objectivity because method is inherently subjective

 Participant observation data consist of the detailed field notes that the researcher records in a field notebook
 Typically textual, may include maps or other diagrams, such as kingship or organizational charts
 Quantification of something, and produce numerical data
 Number of people who enter a particular space and engage in a particular activity during a specified segment of time

 How are the participant observation data used?
 Almost always used in other qualitative methods
 Interviews and focus groups
 At the beginning, participant observation is used to facilitate and develop positive relationships among researchers and key informants, stakeholders, and gate keepers
 important for logistics of the study
 gain permission from appropriate officials, identifying and gaining access to potential participants
 also use data to improve design of other methods, such as interviews and focus groups
 used to determine whom to recruit for the study, and best way to recruit
 cultural understandings gained through participant observation help ask more appropriate follow-up questions and probes, by knowing culturally specific cues
 they also help researchers make sense of other data
 consultation of other’s participant observation data throughout a study can inform instrument design, save time and prevent mistakes.

 Should be discreet enough about who you are and what you are doing so that you do not disrupt normal activity, yet be open enough to the people you observe and interact so that they do not feel that your presence compromises their privacy
 Always alert relevant gatekeepers (community members in positions of official or unofficial authority)
 Never be secretive or deliberately misleading
 Always have a truthful response
 No formal rules for disclosing involvement, but if it gets to the point where you want to ask about specific questions when casually (at a bar, etc) involved with community members, you should reveal your mission.

 With all qualitative methods, must make personal commitment to protect identities
 Maintaining confidentiality ensures that individuals can never be linked to the data they provide
 No names or addresses
 If unsure, always ask for their permission first
 Do not disclose personal characteristics
 Physicial traits
 Consent
 It is important to state that they are not required to talk to you
 If progression goes beyond observation to interview, must inform

 Prepared and willing to adapt to a variety of uncontrolled situations and settings
 Responsibiliites include:
 Observing people engaged in their every day actitivities
 Engage in the activities taking place – to understand and to not call attention
 Interact with people socially outside of controlled environement
 Bar, public meeting place, bus depot, religious gathering, market
 Casually
 Identify/develop relationships with key informants, stateholders and gatekeepers
 Participant observation is done both individualy or as a team
 Factors for arrangement
 Age, gender, physicial appearance, ethnicity, personality, linguistic abilities

 Find out where people often go in their daily lives
 Key informant
 Set up specific times based on particular specific activities taking place
 Important to observe same population in different locations at different times
 Unscheduled observation
 Waiting for the bus, while doing your own shopping
 Basically during spontaneous hours

Category
Appearance
Verbal behavior and interactions
Physical behavior and gestures
Personal space
Human traffic
People who stand out
Includes Researchers should note
Clothing, age, gender, physical appearance
Who speaks to whom and for how long; who initiates interaction; languages or dialects spoken; tone of voice
What people do, who does what, who interacts with whom, who is not interacting
Anything that might indicate membership in groups or in subpopulations of interest to the study, such as profession, social status, socioeconomic class, religion or ethnicity
Gender, age, ethnicity, and profession of speakers; dynamics of interaction
How people use their bodies and voices to communicate different emotions; what individuals’ behaviors indicate about their feelings toward one another, their social rank, or their profession
How close people stand to one another
People who enter, leave, and spend time at the observation site
Identification of people who receive a lot of attention from others
What individual’s preferences concerning personal space suggest about their relationships
Where people enter and exit; how long they stay; who they are
(ethnicity, age, gender); whether they are alone or accompanied; number of people
The characteristics of these individuals; what differentiates them from others; whether people consult them or they approach other people; whether they seem to be strangers or well known by others present

 Key Informants
 Key informants – local individuals who can directly provide important information about the community and thus help the researcher more quickly understand the study population and cultural environment
 Facilitate access to particular resources, populations, organizations, gatekeepers, etc
 Can have personal connections that are invaluable
 These are often found at a field site by chance

 Documentation during participant observation
 Field notes
 Experiences, interactions, and observations
 Account of events, behaviors and reactions, conversations
 Positions of people to one another, comings and goings, physical gestures, subjective responses to observations
 Details and observations necessary to make story of experience complete
 Sketch a map of observation site
 Important establishments and locations
 Location of activities
 Where more observations are needed
 Audio and video recordings not permissible unless consented

 4 kinds of interviews
 Would be sitting among a mass of people who were engaged in drinking beer or performing a ceremony or ritual where his presence was to them merely peripheral and of little importance
 Would participate as far as he could
 Drinking, eating, and making sense of the conversations
 Never asked questions but wanted to
 Others questioned who he was but were later told and would accept
 Nothing valuable for notes
 But for the understanding of their lives, which was invaluable

 Would sit with two or three people, perhaps a man, wife and child. Or a couple of men working in a field and would discuss matters of interest
 Would ask questions in a particular sequence in order to fill in points on which he wanted particular information on
 Would not try to guide the conversations because people would grow bored
 Important for two reasons
 Could fill in gaps of information and could ask for more detailed accounts that wouldn’t be possible to obtain in general discussions with large number of people
 Enabled to make friends and see the main lines of Lugbara culture open out before him

 Discussions with one person
 Best for field notes
 Interviewee motives were mixed
 Prestige to be with observer
 Gain material (beer) from observer
 Pay off old grudges by gossiping
 The Lugbara lack marked differences of wealth or status
 Extremely competitive and jealous
 Bosom friendships of this kind can be somewhat harmful unless extremely careful
 But also very friendly people
 Single most difficult problem: living among people who are themselves living out their everyday lives as does everyone in any society anywhere, but at the same time trying hard to remain outside these local relationships and to be an impartial observer of them.
 Situations when by observations or from gossip he learned of various actions of one, but then would have to talk to perpetrators (with no care of those actions), and would be seen as two faced or cowardly.

 Interview a person with a questionnaire
 Four surveys
 Basic demographic information
 Patterns of marriage with groups and other neighboring villages
 This was done at the end of stay, when he knew exactly what he wanted to ask.

 Two Years in Lugbara
 Upon arrival, engaged in a lot of physical labor
 Was considered “European” for the first 8 months
 Gradually dissipated, when he was allowed to drink in special areas
 Went from “not a European, but a good person”
 Trustworthy
 It was much more common for one to be given incomplete information through no bad intention or fault of informants
 Analyzing the culture of the Lugbara was tricky since human behavior is unpredictable
 One cannot predict the events of a given situation, but one can see the structure or pattern within the scene that is part of a total dram; and one then knows that one understands as much of another culture as one can hope to understand.
 Became “emotionally invested”
 In the later years, worked in Zanzibar and Nigeria, but because of the experiences in Lugbara, he does not remember the people of either Zanzibar and Nigeria, but does of Lugbara.