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Ethnography has taken over "participant observation", where the researcher assimilates in the observed field. You can't accurately describe an event just by second-hand interviews and narratives, that would only give you somebody else's interpretation of an event. You have to be there to observe.
Five dimensions of observation:
Refraining from intervention in the observed field. The Complete Observer (Gold, 1958) maintains a distance from events to avoid influencing them. You can try to distract the participants from the researcher (or camera // Big brother ), or you can be covert which is ethically contestable. Often covert observation does happen in public places where you can't inform passersby participants
How to observe without influencing? // See The Observer Effect (and the uncertainty principle) When the field is more public and unstructured, it means the researcher is less conspicuous and it is thus easier to observe without participating.
She didn't want to stand out or influence the events so she only wrote down the observations after they happened, on scrap paper, beer mats and cigarette boxes. This risks the observations being imprecise or biased, in favor of not influencing the the event (reactivity). The observations were complemented later by interviews. // Sounds like she was still quite a participant. Might seem weird otherwise if she just sits there drinking beer and saying nothing.
The authors note: moving around in public situations is more restricted to women due to dangers, and their perceptions are much more sensitive to those restrictions which makes them observe differently. Therefore it helps to use mixed-gender teams in observation. // 1973 calim from Lofland quoted in 1998 by Adler and Adler . Might be a bit outdated. Can think of other advantages / disadvantages for women
A further suggestion is "painstaking self-observation" of the researcher. Always reflect on the process, during the observation and after.
The topic is concluded to be a strategy "associated more with an understanding of methods based on quantitative and standardized research". It is in attempt to gain an external view of an event as it naturally occurs, while still being inside it, gaining an inside perspective, but also not being completely covert to avoid ethical problems. The authors advise to apply it "mainly to the observation of public spaces in which the number of members cannot be limited or defined."
Markham 2004:
Research online can use the same method as ethnography such as participant observation. // One may think that in the internet it's easier to conduct non-participant observations because the technology allows for easy recording of the exact interactions, as if you are there. Literature refers to this also as 'nonreactive data collection' and 'unobtrusive methods'. [@fieldingSAGEHandbookOnline2008]
Suggestion for research questions on when observing the internet:
// These are all very outdated questions that are and continuously and expansively studied in the literature.
Social aggregations that emerge on the internet with a sustained web of interpersonal relationships.
Hine 2004: As in any ethnography, the ethnographer is required to have a "sustained presence in the field". But in this case, the field is virtual, boundless, and disembodied. The ethnographer could be physically located anywhere and hop in and out of the field as they wish. Without the ethnographers themselves using the medium for prolonged periods, they will not be able to contrive conclusions about it. Hine had problems in gathering information because she couldn't get good responses in newsgroup postings and her web-page as opposed to real life inquiries where she is more experienced in.
// Nowadays we also need to consider physical locations in virtual ethnography, for example Augmented/Mixed Reality, telepresence robots. And we also need to consider embodied approaches in the virtual space when observing Virtual Reality spaces.
It is possible to go beyond the formal communication medium itself and document more 'meta' data. For example screen recording of usage, and recording and sensing of the users while they are physically interacting with the medium. Since access to online participants' real life is limited, virtual ethnography may also be limited.
Postill and Pink (2012) suggest that when conducting virtual ethnography in social media, the ethnographesrs must not restrict themselves to a particular community within a medium or even a particular medium. The heavy integration of hyperlinks, hashtags and references in pages and platforms such as Twitter,Facebook and Instagram keep on expanding the field of observation. The researcher should be mobile using those links just as users would be.
Marres in the book Digital Sociology suggests a distinction between two approaches: 1) Adopting existing sociological and anthropological methods to the digital realm, and 2) Coming up with new native digital methods, for example a pioneering research of big data analysis and visualization of twitter activity during the 2011 riots in UK:
// My thoughts: When doing ethnography online, we should also include human agents and non-human that are involved in the process of social media discussion, for example: Contend moderators, recommendation algorithms, platform developers.
Categorizing material in order to reduce it.
// More updated in 2004 Mayring?
"Because of its systematic character, qualitative content analysis is especially suitable for computer-supported research (Huber 1992;Weitzman and Miles 1995; see 5.14). This is not a matter of automatized analysis (as in quantitative computerized content analysis), but rather of support and documentation of the individual research steps as well as support functions in searching, ordering and preparing for quantita tive analyses. In this connection the ATLAS.ti program, developed for the purpose of qualitative content analysis at the Technical University in Berlin, has proved to be of particular value (cf. Mayring et al. 1996)."
// Open source alternatives? RQDA, Taguette?
Reductions:
"therefore, I have already waited for it, to go to a seminar school, until I finally could teach there for the first time" --> "waited to teach finally" --> "looking forward to practice." --> "practice not experienced as shock but as big fun" // Huge change of meaning!
Explaining things said by looking up definitions or further info. A narrow search looks for explanations in the text while a "wide content analysis looks for content outside of the text. // Explanations by definitions are too objective for subjective interviews! Assuming what somebody meant
Defining internal structures, content domains, salient features (typifying) and defining scales. // Not explained thoroughly and only one example is given in the case of scales.
The method is very clean and organized, but it is also very reductive and may lose meanings. "Categorization of text based on theories may obscure the view of the contents rather than facilitate analyzing the text in its depth and underlying meanings." Explicative techniques risks in being too schematic and not going enough in depth to explain the text.
When conducting group comparative study (Strauss 1987), _"a method which seeks to guarantee comparability by defining topics, and at the same time remaining open to the views related to them." // It does that because it doesn't try to create overarching themes over all of the groups in one short, but instead creates the themes for every single group and only then compares them.
Especially helpful with different social/cultural groups // but can it help otherwise?
Writing all case descriptions for the group interviews:
Deepening on every single case (difference with Strauss), first open coding (expressing data and phenomena as concepts), and then selective coding (formulating the one story of the case)
Strauss coding guidelines for phenomena:
1. Conditions: Why? Whit has led to the situation? Background? Course? 2. Interaction among the actors:Who acted? What happened? 3. Strategies and tactics:Which ways of handling situations, e.g., avoidance, adaptation? 4, Consequencer. What changed? Consequences, results?__
In line with constructivist approaches. Suitable more for comparing between social groups, not for general analysis of phenomena. Can be time consuming!
Ethnography is not a method. It's an end (an account of people's lives and experiences).
The very idea of “ethnographic fieldwork” perpetuates the notion that what you are doing in the field is gathering material on people and their lives—or what, to burnish your social scientific credentials, you might call “qualitative data”—which you will subsequently analyze and write up. That’s why participant observation is so often described in textbooks as a method of data collection. And it is why so much ink has been spilled on the practical and ethical dilemmas of combining participation and observation, as though they pointed in different directions. There is something deeply troubling,as we all know, about joining with people, apparently in good faith, only later to turn your back on them so that yours becomes a study of them, and they become a case. But there is really no contradiction between participation and observation; indeed, you simply cannot have one without the other. The great mistake is to confuse observation with objectification. To observe is not, in itself, to objectify. It is to notice what people are saying and doing, to watch and listen, and to respond in your own practice. That is to say, observation is a way of participating attentively, and it is for this reason a way of learning. As anthropologists, it is what we do, and what we undergo. And we do it and undergo it out of recognition of what we owe to others for our own practical and moral education. Participant observation, in short, is not a technique of data gathering but an ontological commitment. And that commitment is fundamental to the discipline of anthropology.
//Perhaps if we saw ethnography not as an objectifying data collection, which is in itself a problem both for participant and non-participant, we can just see it for what it is. An authentic representation or interpretation of people's lives and experiences, which can be interpreted by the viewer in a number of ways, but not used as a case-study to make generalizations.
The translation of strange cultures to familiar terms, a creation of a stranger in order to destroy it.
Post-modern reflexive ethnography tries to not objectify the observed but instead go into dialog with them, make them co-authors // This is of course not possible at all in non-participant observation.
"To argue that there has been such a shift in the relation between ethnography and authority is to presuppose the possibility of overcoming the relations of force and authorisation that are already implicated in the ethnographic desire to document the lives of strangers."
// Is the ethnography authoritative by definition? The ethnographer is already in a position of power because it uses the experience of others to turn into knowledge relevant for their own field, for publishing in the journal, marking it as data etc. Perhaps would have been better to not conceal those power relations by pretending to be equals with the observed, and instead just reflect on them.
"postmodern fantasy that it is the ‘I’ of the ethnographer who can undo the power relations that allowed the ‘I’ to appear. Such a fantasy allows the ethnographer to be praised for her or his ability to listen well. So it remains the ethnographer who is praised: praised for the giving up of her or his authority. The event of recognition demonstrates that the ethnographic document still returns home in postmodernism, but that the returning home is concealed in the fantasy of being-together-as-strangers"
"Our task, in opening out the possibility of strangers knowing differently to how they are known, is to draw attention to the forms of authorisation and labour that are concealed by stranger fetishism. Such stranger fetishism is implicit in the assumption that the stranger is any-body we do not know, or in the assumption that we can transform the ‘being’ of strangers into knowledge. It is only by contesting the discourses of stranger fetishism, that we can open out the possibility of a knowledge that does not belong to the (ethnographic) community, even in the event of its failure to ‘know the stranger’."
// We shouldn't treat the stranger as one absolute stranger, that we are all strangers and all the same,we should recognize the stranger but more importantly the relations of power and production involved in observation, and try to challenge them.