When you are studying people’s
behaviour or asking them
questions, not only the values of
the researcher but the researcher's
responsibilities to those studied
have to be faced (Silverman 2000:
200).
…in terms of the amount of
control the researcher applies in
the interview situation.
Four interview situations
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Informal interviewing
Unstructured interviewing
Semistructured interviewing
Structured interviewing
First:
• Informal interviewing (lack of control
over the informant, environment, topic,
etc.)
• Lack of structure
• Method of choice during the first
phase of research
Second:
• Unstructured interviewing: minimum of
control over the informant’s responses
• Not at all like informal interviewing
• Most widely used technique by
cultural/social anthropologists
• Building initial rapport, access to particular kind
of informants
Unstructured interviewing is
useful for:
• Developing formal guides for semistructured
interviewing to learn what kind of questions to
include.
• Building initial rapport: before moving to more
formal interviews.
• Talking to informants who do not tolerate formal
interviews (semistructured and structured ones)
Third
• Semistructured interviewing: utilise when
the ethnographer has only one chance for an
interview.
• (based on the use of an interview guide
• Effective in projects where the ethnographer
deals with elite members
Fourth:
• Structured interviewing: all informants
are asked the same questions (uniformity)
• Questionnaires
Tape recorder
• Use in all situations
• Different types of transcriptions
• Not a substitute for note taking
Deference and expectancy effects
• 1.when informants tell you what they think
you want to know
• 2. Tendency from experimenters to obtain
results they expect
How do social/cultural
anthropologists collect qualitative
data?
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Video and audiotapes
Photographs
Newspaper clippings
Transcriptions of formal interviews
Notes on formal interviews
Personal letters
Texts written by locals
Field notes
Four types of field notes
• Jottings (“scratch notes”): no detail, general
information, key words, etc.
• The diary: personal, self-reflexive, refuge, copping
with adverse situations, etc.
• The log: running account of how you plan to
spend and how you spent time and money
• The notes: notes on method (M), ethnographic or
descriptive notes, and analytical notes.
notes on method (M)
• Notes about techniques you
discover in the field
ethnographic or descriptive
notes
• Notes on environments,
observation of process,
relationships
analytical notes
• Notes about making sense of
observations, conversations, interviews
Two strategies for observing
behavior
Obvious or reactive and
unobtrusive or nonreactive
Reactive:
• when people know you are observing them
• deference problems corrected by long term
observation
• Produces a lot of data (5 days of
observation produced 75,000 words)
• continuous monitoring (CM)
Nonreactive
• Studying people’s behavior without people
knowing about it.
• Includes all methods: Behavior traced studies,
Archival research, Content analysis, Disguised
observation
Behavior traced studies
• Graffiti study by Flores and Sechrest 1969
• Simultaneous analysis of graffiti in public toilets
of two cities
• Attitudes towards sexuality in two cultures
• Dealing with homosexuality: Chicago 42%,
Manila 2%
Archival research
• Truly nonreactive: no change on behaviour
(records of births and deaths, migration, etc.)
• Possible problems?
Content analysis:
• Fiction, non-fiction, recorded folktales,
newspapers
• Reduce the information of the texts to
patterns, variables and correlations
• Study of personal advertisements: Hirshman
1987
Disguised observation:
• (when the researcher pretends to join a group and
proceeds to record data about the group.)
• The members of the group do not know of
his/her observation and recording
• What are the possible problems with this
type of observation?