Doing Field Projects

9 Participant Observation

Like ethnographic interviewing, participant observation is a quintessential ethnographic technique. Compared to other qualitative research approaches, participant observation allows the ethnographer to understand the cultural content and context of behaviors and their motivations more intimately by virtue of being actively engaged in the same sorts of activities as their research participants. Bodily perceptions, feelings, and experiences all become part of the data collection process. In this chapter you will engage in an introductory participant observation exercise and document the data you gather as well as the challenges and possibilities inherent in this technique.

Learning Goals

1. Articulate the complexity and difficulty of participant observation fieldwork.
2. Practice a variety of data gathering techniques, and also develop ways of balancing them in intensive sessions.

Extended participant observation is one of the pillars of social and cultural anthropology as described in the Introduction. This kind of fieldwork can take a year or more to complete and has a whole slew of difficulties associated with it that you do not have to face. Even so, you should have some hands-on familiarity with the method, and doing fieldwork in your own backyard is quite legitimate. There was a time when locals doing fieldwork in the United Kingdom or the United States was frowned upon as inauthentic. This stance had to do with the history of the discipline in which ...