Journeys Through Ethnography

Realistic Accounts Of Fieldwork

Annette Lareau, Jeffrey Shultz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429979125
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Learning how to carry out research projects using participant observation and in-depth interviews has become a priority for scholars in a wide range of fields, including anthropology, sociology, education, social work, nursing, and psychology. This book, a collection of well-known fieldwork accounts covering the qualitative research process, aims to help undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars in the social sciences understand common problems in the research process and learn strategies for resolving them.Unlike methods books that treat research issues in a superficial or prescriptive fashion, this book realistically portrays, through researchers own accounts, the process of discovery and resolution of conflicts involved in fieldwork. It also shows the costs involved in the choice of solutions. Students and seasoned scholars alike will find the collection a source of knowledge, inspiration, and comfort concerning the complexity of conducting fieldwork. }Learning how to carry out research projects using participant observation and in-depth interviews has become a priority for scholars in a wide range of fields, including anthropology, sociology, education, social work, nursing, and psychology. This book, a collection of well-known fieldwork accounts covering the qualitative research process, aims to help undergraduate students, graduate students, and scholars in the social sciences understand common problems in the research process and learn strategies for resolving them.Unlike methods books that treat research issues in a superficial or prescriptive fashion, this book realistically portrays, through researchers own accounts, the process of discovery and resolution of conflicts involved in fieldwork. It also shows the costs involved in the choice of solutions. Students and seasoned scholars alike will find the collection a source of knowledge, inspiration, and comfort concerning the complexity of conducting fieldwork. }

On the Evolution of
Street Corner Society

WILLIAM FOOTE WHYTE

In the years since completing Street Corner Society I have several times sought to teach students the research methods needed for field studies of communities or organizations. Like other instructors in this field, I have been severely handicapped by the paucity of reading matter that I can assign to students.

There are now many good published studies of communities or organizations, but generally the published report gives little attention to the actual process whereby the research was carried out. There have also been some useful statements on methods of research, but, with a few exceptions, they place the discussion entirely on a logical-intellectual basis. They fail to note that the researcher, like his informants, is a social animal. He has a role to play, and he has his own personality needs that must be met in some degree if he is to function successfully. Where the researcher operates out of a university, just going into the field for a few hours at a time, he can keep his personal social life separate from field activity. His problem of role is not quite so complicated. If, on the other hand, the researcher is living for an extended period in the community he is studying, his personal life is inextricably mixed with his research. A real explanation, then, of how the research was done necessarily involves a rather personal account of how the researcher lived during the period of study.

This account of living in the community may help also to explain the process of analysis of the data. The ideas that we have in research are only in part a logical product growing out of a careful weighing of evidence. We do not generally think problems through in a straight line. Often we have the experience of being immersed in a mass of confusing data. We study the data carefully, bringing all our powers of logical analysis to bear upon them. We come up with an idea or two. But still the data do not fall in any coherent pattern. Then we go on living with the data—and with the people—until perhaps some chance occurrence casts a totally different light upon the data, and we begin to see a pattern that we have not seen before. This pattern is not purely an artistic creation. Once we think we see it, we must reexamine our notes and perhaps set out to gather new data in order to determine whether the pattern adequately represents the life we are observing or is simply a product of our imagination. Logic, then, plays an important part. But I am convinced that the actual evolution of research ideas does not take place in accord with the formal statements we read on research methods. The ideas grow up in part out of our immersion in the data and out of the whole process of living. Since so much of this process of analysis proceeds on the unconscious level, I am sure that we can never present a full account of it. However, an account of the way the research was done may help to explain how the pattern of Street Corner Society gradually emerged.

I am not suggesting that my approach to Street Corner Society should be followed by other researchers. To some extent my approach must be unique to myself, to the particular situation, and to the state of knowledge existing when I began research. On the other hand, there must be some common elements of the field research process. Only as we accumulate a series of accounts of how research was actually done will we be able to go beyond the logical-intellectual picture and learn to describe the actual research process. What follows, then, is simply one contribution toward that end.

1. Personal Background

I come from a very consistent upper-middle-class background. One grandfather was a doctor; the other, a superintendent of schools. My father was a college professor. My upbringing, therefore, was very far removed from the life I have described in Cornerville.

At Swarthmore College I had two strong interests: economics (mixed with social reform) and writing. In college I wrote a number of short stories and one-act plays. During the summer after college I made an attempt at a novel. This writing was valuable to me largely in what it taught me about myself. Several of the stories appeared in the college literary magazine, and one was accepted for publication (but never published) in Story magazine. Three of the one-act plays were produced at Swarthmore in the annual one-act playwriting contest. Not a bad start for someone who had hopes, as I did then, for a writing career. But yet I felt uneasy and dissatisfied. The plays and stories were all fictionalized accounts of events and situations I had experienced or observed myself. When I attempted to go beyond my experience and tackle a novel on a political theme, the result was a complete bust. Even as I wrote the concluding chapters, I realized that the manuscript was worthless. I finished it, I suppose, just so that I could say to myself that I had written a novel.

Now I had read the often-given advice to young writers that they should write out of their own experience, so I had no reason to be ashamed of this limitation. On the other hand, it was when I reflected upon my experience that I became uneasy and dissatisfied. My home life had been very happy and intellectually stimulating—but without adventure. I had never had to struggle over anything. I knew lots of nice people, but almost all of them came from good, solid middle-class backgrounds like my own. In college, of course, I was associating with middle-class students and middle-class professors. I knew nothing about the slums (or the gold coast for that matter). I knew nothing about life in the factories, fields, or mines—except what I had gotten out of books. So I came to feel that I was a pretty dull fellow. At times this sense of dulness became so oppressive that I simply could not think of any stories to write. I began to feel that, if I were really going to write anything worth while, I would somehow have to get beyond the narrow social borders of my existence up to that time.

My interest in economics and social reform also led in the direction of Street Corner Society. One of my most vivid college memories is of a day spent with a group of students in visiting the slums of Philadelphia. I remember it not only for the images of dilapidated buildings and crowded people but also for the sense of embarrassment I felt as a tourist in the district. I had the common young man’s urge to do good to these people, and yet I knew then that the situation was so far beyond anything I could realistically attempt at the time that I felt like an insincere dabbler even to be there. I began to think sometimes about going back to such a district and really learning to know the people and the conditions of their lives.

My social reform urges came out in other forms on the campus. In my sophomore year I was one of a group of fifteen men who resigned from their fraternities amid a good deal of fanfare. This was an exciting time on the campus, and some of the solid fraternity men were fearful lest the structure would crumble under their feet. They should not have worried. Fraternities went right along without us. In my senior year I became involved in another effort at campus reform. This time we were aiming at nothing less than a reorganization of the whole social life of the campus. The movement got off to a promising start but then quickly petered out.

These abortive reform efforts had one great value to me. I saw that reform was not so easy. I recognized that I had made a number of mistakes. I also came to the realization that some of the people who had fought against me the hardest were really pretty nice fellows. I did not conclude from this that they were right and I was wrong, but I came to recognize how little I really knew about the forces that move people to action. Out of my own reflections about the failures of my campus reform efforts grew a keener interest in understanding other people.

There was also a book that I had read, which weighed most heavily with me at this time. It was the Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens. I got my hands on it during the year I spent in Germany between high school and college. In my efforts to master German, this was the only thing written in English that I read for some time, so perhaps it weighed more heavily with me than it otherwise would. In any case, I was fascinated by it and read it through several times. Steffens had begun as a reformer, and he never abandoned this urge to change things. Yet he had such an unending curiosity about the world around him that he became more and more interested in discovering how society actually functioned. He demonstrated that a man of a background similar to my own could step out of his own usual walks of life and gain an intimate knowledge of individuals and groups whose activities and beliefs were far different from his own. So you could actually get these “corrupt politicians” to talk to you. This I needed to know. It helped me sometimes when I had the feeling that the people I was interviewing would much rather have me get out of there altogether.

2. Finding Cornerville

When I was graduated from Swarthmore in 1936, I received a fellowship from the Society of Fellows at Harvard. This provided me with a unique sort of opportunity—three years of support for any line of research I wished to pursue. The only restriction was that I was not allowed to accumulate credits toward a Ph.D. degree. I am grateful now for this restriction. If I had been allowed to work for the Ph.D., I suppose I should have felt that I must take advantage of the time and the opportunity. With this avenue cut off, I was forced to do what I wanted to do, regardless of academic credits.

I began with a vague idea that I wanted to study a slum district. Eastern City provided several possible choices. In the early weeks of my Harvard fellowship I spent some of my time walking up and down the streets of the various slum districts of Eastern City and talking with people in social agencies about these districts.

I made my choice on very unscientific grounds: Cornerville best fitted my picture of what a slum district should look like. Somehow I had developed a picture of run-down three- to five-story buildings crowded in together. The dilapidated wooden-frame buildings of some other parts of the city did not look quite genuine to me. To be sure, Cornerville did have one characteristic that recommended it on a little more objective basis. It had more people per acre living in it than any other section of the city If a slum meant overcrowding, this was certainly it.

3. Planning the Study

As soon as I had found my slum district, I set about planning my study. It was not enough for me at the time to plan for myself alone. I had begun reading in the sociological literature and thinking along the lines of the Lynds’ Middletown. Gradually I came to think of myself as a sociologist or a social anthropologist instead of an economist. I found that, while slums had been given much attention in the sociological literature, there existed no real community study of such a district. So I set out to organize a community study for Cornerville. This was clearly a big job. My early outline of the study pointed to special researches in the history of the district, in economics (living standards, housing, marketing, distribution, and employment), politics (the structure of the political organization and its relation to the rackets and the police), patterns of education and recreation, the church, public health, and—of all things—social attitudes. Obviously, this was more than a one-man job, so I designed it for about ten men.

With this project statement in hand I approached L. J. Henderson, an eminent biochemist who was secretary of the Society of Fellows.

We spent an hour together, and I came away with my plans very much in a state of flux. As I wrote to a friend at this time: “Henderson poured cold water on the mammoth beginning, told me that I should not cast such grandiose plans when I had done hardly any work in the field myself. It would be much sounder to get in the field and try to build up a staff slowly as I went along. If I should get a ten-man project going by fall, the responsibility for the direction and co-ordination of it would inevitably fall upon me, since I would have started it. How could I direct ten people in a field that was unfamiliar to me? Henderson said that, if I did manage to get a ten-man project going, it would be the ruination of me, he thought. Now, the way he put all this it sounded quite sensible and reasonable.”

This last sentence must have been written after I had had time to recover from the interview, because I remember it as being a crushing experience. I suppose good advice is just as hard to take as poor advice, and yet in a very short time I realized that Henderson was right, and I abandoned the grandiose plan I had made. Since people who offer painful but good advice so seldom get any thanks for it, I shall always be glad that I went to see Henderson again shortly before his death and told him that I had come to feel that he had been absolutely right.

While I abandoned the ten-man project, I was reluctant to come down to earth altogether. It seemed to me that, in view of the magnitude of the task I was undertaking, I must have at least one collaborator, and I began to cast about for means of getting a college friend of mine to join me in the field. There followed through the winter of 1936–37 several revisions of my outline of the community study and numerous interviews with Harvard professors who might help me to get the necessary backing.

As I read over these various research outlines, it seems to me that the most impressive thing about them is their remoteness from the actual study I carried on. As I went along, the outlines became gradually more sociological, so that I wound up this phase planning to devote major emphasis to a sort of sociometric study of the friendship patterns of people. I would start with one family and ask them who their friends were and who the people were that they were more or less hostile to. Then I would go to these friends and get the list of their friends and learn in the process something of their activities together. In this way, I was to chart the social structure of at least some of the community. Even this, of course, I did not do, for I came to find that you could examine social structure directly through observing people in action.

When, a year later in the fall of 1937, John Howard, also a Harvard junior fellow, changed his field from physical chemistry to sociology, I invited him to join me in the Cornerville study. We worked together for two years, with Howard particularly concentrating on one of the churches and its Holy Name Society. The discussions between us helped immensely in clarifying my ideas. But only a few months after I had begun Cornerville field work, I had completely abandoned the thought of building up a Cornerville staff. I suppose that I found Cornerville life so interesting and rewarding that I no longer felt a need to think in large-scale terms.

Although I was completely at sea in planning the study, at least I had valuable help in developing the field research methods which were eventually to lead to a study plan as well as to the data here reported.

It is hard to realize now how rapid has been the development of sociological and anthropological studies of communities and organizations since 1936, when I began my work in Cornerville. At that time nothing had yet been published on W. Lloyd Warner’s “Yankee City” study. I had read the Lynds’ Middletown and Carolyn Ware’s Greenwich Village with interest and profit, and yet I began to realize, more and more as I went along, that I was not making a community study along those lines. Much of the other sociological literature then available tended to look upon communities in terms of social problems so that the community as an organized social system simply did not exist.

I spent my first summer following the launching of the study in reading some of the writings of Durkheim and Pareto’s The Mind and Society (for a seminar with L. J. Henderson, which I was to take in the fall of 1937). I had a feeling that these writings were helpful but still only in a general way Then I began reading in the social anthropological literature, beginning with Malinowski, and this seemed closer to what I wanted to do even though the researchers were studying primitive tribes and I was in the middle of a great city district.

If there was then little to guide me in the literature, I needed that much more urgently to have the help of people more skilled and experienced than I in the work I was undertaking. Here I was extraordinarily fortunate in meeting Conrad M. Arensberg at the very outset of my Harvard appointment. He also was a junior fellow, so that we naturally saw much of each other. After having worked for some months with W. Lloyd Warner in the Yankee City study, he had gone with Solon Kimball to make a study of a small community in Ireland. When I met him, he had just returned from this field trip and was beginning to write up his data. With Eliot Chappie, he was also in the process of working out a new approach to the analysis of social organization. The two men had been casting about together for ways of establishing such social research on a more scientific basis. Going over the Yankee City data and the Irish study, also, they had set up five different theoretical schemes. One after the other each of the first four schemes fell to the ground under their own searching criticism or under the prods of Henderson or Elton Mayo or others whom they consulted. At last they began to develop a theory of interaction. They felt that, whatever else might be subjective in social research, one could establish objectively the pattern of interaction among people: how often A contacts B, how long they spend together, who originates action when A, B, and C are together, and so on. Careful observation of such interpersonal events might then provide reliable data upon the social organization of a community. At least this was the assumption. Since the theory grew out of research already done, it was natural that these previous studies did not contain as much of the quantitative data as the theory would have required. So it seemed that I might be one of the first to take the theory out into the field.

Arensberg and I had endless discussions of the theory, and in some of these Eliot Chappie participated. At first it seemed very confusing to me—I am not sure I have it all clear yet—but I had a growing feeling that here was something solid that I could build upon.

Arensberg also worked with me on field research methods, emphasizing the importance of observing people in action and getting down a detailed report of actual behavior completely divorced from moral judgments. In my second semester at Harvard, I took a course given by Arensberg and Chappie concerning social anthropological community studies. While this was helpful, I owed much more to the long personal conversations I had with Arensberg throughout the Cornerville research, particularly in its early stages.

In the fall of 1937 I took a small seminar with Elton Mayo. This involved particularly readings from the works of Pier...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
• Introduction
• 1 On the Evolution of Street Corner Society
• 2 Choosing a Host (November 6–November 28, 1979)
• 3 On the Making of Ain’t No Makin’ It
• 4 Reflections on a Tale Told Twice
• 5 Beyond Subjectivity
• 6 Common Problems in Field Work: A Personal Essay
• Epilogue: A Selective Guide to the Literature
• Notes on the Book
• Notes on the Editors and Contributors