Principles, Approaches and Issues in Participant Observation

Danny L. Jorgensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367415280
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000031249
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a succinct, student-friendly outline of the principles, approaches, and issues in participant observation. An examination of these basic tenets is important for clarifying the philosophical rationale for conducting participant observation, making important research decisions, and appreciating the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches within the method.

Participant observation as a formal means of inquiry is developed in close relation with the competing approaches of reality (ontology), truthfully apprehending reality (epistemology), and formal research (methodology). In this volume Jorgensen discusses the resulting methodologies of positivism, humanism, and most recently postmodernism in relation to principles, approaches, and issues in participant observation. Specific features of participant observation, as exemplified in a wide range of classic and contemporary studies, are examined by way of these methodological approaches along with the troublesome complexities of values, politics, ethics, and contemporary debates over appropriate representations of the resulting findings about human life.

This concise primer is suitable for undergraduate and graduate students in a wide range of disciplines such as anthropology, religious studies, sociology and nursing.

1 Introduction

This book overviews and discusses principles, approaches, and issues in ethnographic fieldwork devoted specifically to the methodology of participant observation (see Jorgensen, 1989, for an outline of this methodology and related strategies and procedures; also see Atkinson and Hammersley, 1998; Atkinson, 2007; Jorgensen, 2015). Participant observation is viewed here as a unique method for investigating human existence. It is presented by examining the development of scholarly debates over the character of reality (social ontology), how these realities may be apprehended (social epistemology), and the means for investigating them (methodology), as well as closely related controversies over values, politics, ethics, and different approaches to conveying research findings (see Hinkle, 1980, 1994, for further discussion of this general theoretical framework). Intellectual responses to these complex philosophical and theoretical issues result in three general orientations—characterized by positivism, humanism, and postmodernism—to participant observation. These methodological orientations supply specific rationales and logics for doing participant observation. Understanding these theoretical matters is of the utmost importance for practicing the art and craft of participation observation. Otherwise, methods of participant observation are little more than a set of technical strategies and procedures for collecting data. This primer on participant observation aims to make this complex constellation of interrelated issues accessible to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and a wide variety of professionals.

A critical distinction between the characteristics of physical as juxtaposed to human realities, for example, supplies one of the principal rationales for the methodology of participant observation. Investigations of the strictly physical properties of the universe necessarily are limited to whatever may be discerned from the standpoint of an external observer. Studies of human existence are not limited to the exterior, physical characteristics of the human universe. It also is possible and necessary to investigate the interior, experiential, and intersubjectively meaningful world of human existence (Schutz, 1962, 1967; also see Weber 2019; and Znaniecki, 1934. Participant observation thereby is one of the premier methods for conducting investigations of the realities of human existence in their totality as they exhibit both external, physical characteristics and internal, subjective, and intersubjectively meaningful properties.

This chapter introduces participant observation and discusses it as a method of research that is uniquely suited for human studies. Participant observation is defined and its most distinctive features—the researcher’s active involvement in everyday life situations and settings of human existence—are discussed briefly. These features of participant observation are presented with reference to the classic and contemporary literature on this methodology. Participant observation is described and illustrated in relationship to the closely related and sometimes inclusive research strategies of qualitative, ethnographic, and field research. Some of the appropriate uses of participant observation for human studies are described and illustrated. In conclusion, this chapter discusses the plan of this book for presenting principles, approaches, and issues in participant observation as a unique methodology for studying human existence.

A definition of participant observation

The anthropologist and highly accomplished literary figure, Zora Neale Hurston (1942: 143), reflecting about participant observational research, commented accurately that: “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.” More specifically, participant observation in its most uncomplicated form is an inimitable method for collecting information about people and matters related to them in some situation (see Bruyn, 1966; McCall and Simmons, 1969; Spradley, 1980; Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983; Jerolmack and Khan, 2018). It is distinguished from other methods for researching human existence by the investigator’s participation in the lives of those being studied while making observations and otherwise collecting information. Two additional aspects of participant observation—the character of the researcher’s participation and the properties of the human settings studied—help clarify what is distinctive and exceptional about this method of research.

Modes of participation

The researcher’s participation, at least in principle, may range along a continuum from passive to active; although it sometimes is difficult to discriminate clearly and unambiguously between these poles (see Gold, 1958; Junker, 1960; Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983; Atkinson and Hammersley, 1998. Even so, passive participation suggests that the researcher is present at some human scene but not otherwise engaged directly with people or their activities. Active participation, conversely, implies that the researcher is joined with people—their thoughts, feelings, and activities—and, thereby, involved with and connected to their lives (see Goffman, 1989). During the course of participant observational research the investigator may be a mostly passive participant in some situations and a more or less active participant in others. It is the more active aspect of participation in the lives of the people studied that clearly differentiates this research method from other forms of observational inquiry (see Adler and Adler, 1987, 2012; Savage, 2000).

In some situations, for example, Zora Neale Hurston (1942) was a mostly passive participant present at the scene of investigation. She (1935) gathered an impressive collection of African American folktales, spirituals, and similar materials by listening to people, sometimes while soliciting additional material or information, but without otherwise participating actively. On other occasions, Hurston actively participated, joining in the events and lifeways she was studying. At a lumber camp in Polk County, Florida, for instance, she (1942: 152) gathered songs from the men, noting that “because of my research methods I had dug in with the male community.” Aware that this might cause trouble, she was careful to interact with the women too, developing friendly relationships with them, especially Big Sweet, a powerful member of the female community. One of the men, Slim, proved to be an especially valuable informant: “He was knocking the pad with women, all around, and he seemed to want to sort of free-lance at it. But what he seemed to care most about was picking his guitar, and singing.” Hurston, like many participant observers, cultivated this relationship: “… so I built him up a bit by buying him drinks and letting him ride in my car.” Slim’s girlfriend, Lucy, took offense. Although Lucy’s problems with Slim had little to do with Zora directly, she reported that: “Lucy really wanted to kill me.” Hurston’s active participation in the community ended when Lucy physically attacked her in a “saw-mill jook” (or nightclub), Big Sweet intervened, and Hurston was able to escape. While active participation may result in a wide variety of advantages as well as undesirable social complications, most of them, as discussed in subsequent chapters, fortunately are not life threatening. It should be noted, however, that participant observation of illegal activities, armed conflicts, and perhaps a few other socially volatile settings may present serious risks and dangers (see, for instance, Ferrell and Hamm, 1998; Williams, Jenkings, Woodward, and Rech, 2016; and Baird, 2017).

For many years participant observers were warned against crossing over the artificial boundary separating active participation as a researcher to participating fully as a societal member in some setting. Anthropologists traditionally refer to breeching this taboo against the most active form of participation as “going native” (Tedlock, 1991). For many early anthropologists, going native signified abandoning the objectivity of a Western scientific worldview for the subjective vantage point of indigenous peoples. By the late 1970s, however, anthropologists deliberatively were going native for its strategic research advantages and sociologists were “becoming the phenomenon” for similar reasons (Jules-Rosette, 1975; Mehan and Wood, 1975; Sudnow, 1978; Jorgensen, 1992). In many cases it is difficult to acquire an adequate appreciation for the meanings and activities of the societal members being studied without experiencing this world directly. Participant observers even more recently have depended on their existing native or insider membership, primarily or exclusively, in developing “autoethnographies” whereby the researcher’s self involvement as an insider becomes a source of data (see Goldschmidt, 1977; Hayano, 1979; Holman Jones, Adams, and Ellis, 2013; Adams, Jones, and Ellis, 2015; and Hughes and Pennington, 2017).

Perhaps because she was an African American woman studying what was thought to be her own culture (or subculture), no one seems to have noticed, or at least objected, when Zora Neale Hurston dared to innovatively violate the taboo against “going native” in the 1920s and ’30s, becoming an extremely active participant. While becoming thoroughly immersed in human existence may place unusual and extraordinary demands on the participant observer, it often results in the collection of an exceptionally rich variety of information about the realities of daily life. This strategy thereby usually leads to a much more profound understanding of the people being studied, one that is not available by way of any other research method. At New Orleans, for example, Zora Hurston (1942: 157; also 1935) actively participated as an apprentice in Hoodoo (or voodoo “to white folks”) ceremonies for research purposes. In one case she was required to “sit at the crossroads at midnight in complete darkness and meet the Devil, and make a compact,” much like in the classic African American blues songs. In another instance, she (1942: 156; also see 1935) participated in a Hoodoo initiation: “I lay naked for three days and nights on a couch, with my navel to a rattlesnake skin which had been dressed and dedicated to the ceremony.” During this period Hurston was allowed no food and only some water so that her “soul” would not go away, get attacked by “evil influences,” and not return to her. She began experiencing “exalted dreams” on the second day, followed by “dreams that seemed real for weeks” on the third night. “In one,” she reported, “I strode across the heavens with lightning flashing from under my feet, and grumbling thunder followed in my wake.” The collection of information of such an immensely rich quality generally is only available through direct participatory experience.

Everyday life settings

The settings of participant observational investigations are ones characterized by whatever it is that people do ordinarily in the course of their lives, as in the unusual case of New Orleans’ Hoodoo. These situations usually are not concocted or shaped by the participant observer. In this sense they are the ordinary, everyday life, or “natural” settings of human existence (see, for example, Lincoln and Guba, 1985; Jorgensen, 1989; Angrosino, 2007). Furthermore, the everyday life situations studied by participant observation are not manipulated by the researcher; or, at least, they usually are not manipulated beyond whatever forms of human control and management ordinarily are sanctioned by the people in these settings. Participant observation thereby differs noticeably from methods of inquiry, such as experiments or surveys, whereby the researcher artificially creates and manipulates the study conditions more or less extensively. The methodology of participant observation, in comparison, is a much less intrusive, reactive, or unnatural form of investigation (see Webb et al., 1981).

Zora Neale Hurston’s participant observation investigations, for example, were conducted in ordinary and not so ordinary situations but naturally occurring settings across the southern United States as well as in Haiti and the Caribbean. She observed and participated in phosphate mines, lumber and railroad camps, citrus harvesting operations, rural villages, small towns and big cities, jook joints and other leisure gatherings, informal and formal religious occasions, and many other situations and settings, all of them part of the natural scenes and events of human existence. Having recorded African American spirituals in the natural environment, Hurston was not impressed by the highly arranged versions she witnessed being performed on stage when she returned to New York. Her (1942: 172) motto of “Let the People Sing,” was rejected by composers on the grounds that white audiences would not listen to them. Yet she “wondered what would happen if a white audience ever heard a real spiritual.”

Hurston (1942: 172) tested the idea in 1932 by putting together a group of performers who were directed toward a more natural production. Knowing that the spirituals were not ordinarily performed “without motion,” she did not permit the singers to “stand in a stiff group and reach for the high note.” Instead, she “dramatized a working day on a railroad camp, from the shack-rouser waking up the camp at dawn until the primitive dance in the deep woods at night.” The audience and critics indeed appreciated the difference, some of them commenting on now un-rehearsed and “natural” it appeared even when performed on stage. This example also illustrates Zora Hurston’s experimentation with alternative forms of presenting the findings of participant observation, long before this issue became a preoccupying concern among ethnographers in the late 1980s (as discussed in Chapter 6).

In short, then, participant observation is a form of research or “formalized curiosity” that involves “poking and prying with a purpose.” It was more formally defined here as a unique method of investigating human existence whereby the researcher more or less actively participates with people in commonplace situations and everyday life settings while observing and otherwise gathering information. Participating in everyday life while observing affords the researcher direct access to human meanings and other aspects of human existence that generally are not accessible from the standpoint of an external observer. Additional features of participant observation will be discussed at length in Chapter 3. In the meantime, it is useful to identify participant observation further by distinguishing it from such closely related and sometimes included approaches as qualitative, ethnographic, and field research.

Qualitative, ethnographic, and field research methods

Participant observation is closely related to “qualitative” and “ethnographic” methods of research (even being one of them) as well as those involving “field research” or “field work” (see Denzin, 1997; Denzin and Lincoln, 1994, 2002, 2003, 2005; Jorgensen, 2015; Tracy, 2019). Over the past thirty-some years the strategies of investigation subsumed under these headings have become increasingly legitimate and tremendously popular in a broad range of disciplines and field (see, for example, Hammersley, 2017a). Besides the disciplines of anthropology and sociology where formal methods of participant observation originated, these forms of research are widely employed today in most all of the traditional social sciences (see, for example, Schatz, 2009; Gomez and Jones, 2010; Kapiszewski, MacLean, and Read, 2015; Clifford, Cope, Gillespie, and French, 2016: Berg and Lune, 2017; Howitt, 2019), as well as many other basic and applied fields concerned with human meanings and activities. This includes: business, marketing, management, and related organizational studies (Moisander and Valtonen, 2006; Tian, Lillis, and van Marrewijk, 2013; Strang, 2015; Pushkala, 2018; Bell, Bryman, and Harley, 2019; Maison, 2019); communication (Bochner and Ellis, 2002; Brennen, 2017; Lindlof and Taylor, 2019), criminology and criminal justice (Pogrebin, 2003; Miller and Tewksbury, 2005; Bayens and Roberson, 2010; Copes and Miller, 2015; Bachman and Schutt, 2018; Hagan and Daigle, 2020); education (Bogdan and Biklen, 2007; Conway, 2014; Curtis, Murphy, and Shields, 2014; Delamont, 2016; Johnson, 2017; Conteh, 2017; Beach, Bagley, Marques, and da Silva, 2018; Ruecker and Svilha, 2019); human services and social work (Carey, 2012; Padgett, 2017); medicine, nursing, and health (Latimer, 2003; Tolley et al., 2016; Holloway and Galvin, 2017; Green and Thorogood, 2018); religious studies (Spickard and Landres, 2002; Graham, 2011); as well as a diverse variety of other areas and fields of study (see, for example, Reinharz, 1992; Seale, Gobo, Gubrium, and Silverman, 2004; Phillimore and Goodson, 2004; Reason and Bradbury, 2008; Newing, 2011; Hesse-Biber, 2014; Smith and Sparkes, 2016; Merriam and Grenier, 2019). Labels such as participant observation, qualitative, ethnographic, and field research frequently are used almost interchangeably as general descriptors of a particular orientation to human studies, sometimes leading to confusion among them (see, for instance, Denzin and Lincoln, 1994). Looking briefly at what each of these designations refers to specifically therefore will provide some useful clarification.

Qualitative versus quantitative research

In human studies “qualitative” research commonly is contrasted with “quantitative” research, reflecting a broad division that is intended to express substantially different methodological orientations (see, for example, Patten and Newhart, 2017; Bernard, 2018; Creswell and Creswell, 2018). Quantitative approaches to research are understood specifically to emphasize the measurement of human phenomena by particular tests and instruments, statistical analysis of the resulting data, hypothesis testing, deductive reasoning, and explanation. Any concept—such as income, education, marital satisfaction, intelligence, or even religiosity—can be defined by an amount (or numerically) and, thereby, measured; these quantities can be examined statistically; and the results can be used to test rival hypotheses and provide explanations.

Qualitative approaches to research, conversely, aim for detailed descriptions of features, properties, and characteristics of human experiences and circumstances as well as some interpretation of them (see, for instance, Schwartz and Jacobs, 1979; Taylor and Bogdan, 1984; Taylor, Bogdan, and DeVault, 2016; Miles and Huberman, 1994; Seale et al., 2004). Matters such as income, education, marital satisfaction, intelligence, and religiosity can be described by the characteristics of these human phenomena, particularly the feelings and meanings people attach to them. Qualitative descriptions of these human meanings can be used to construct interpretations of the human condition specif...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the author
• Preface, acknowledgments, and dedication
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Philosophy and methodology
• 3 Distinctive characteristics
• 4 Values and politics
• 5 Ethics
• 6 Facts and representations of them
• 7 Conclusion
• References
• Index