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Listening to People: A Practical Guide to Interviewing, Participant Observation, Data Analysis, and Writing It All Up
Listening to People: A Practical Guide to Interviewing, Participant Observation, Data Analysis, and Writing It All Up
Listening to People: A Practical Guide to Interviewing, Participant Observation, Data Analysis, and Writing It All Up
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Listening to People: A Practical Guide to Interviewing, Participant Observation, Data Analysis, and Writing It All Up

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A down-to-earth, practical guide for interview and participant observation and analysis.

In-depth interviews and close observation are essential to the work of social scientists, but inserting one’s researcher-self into the lives of others can be daunting, especially early on.  Esteemed sociologist Annette Lareau is here to help. Lareau’s clear, insightful, and personal guide is not your average methods text. It promises to reduce researcher anxiety while illuminating the best methods for first-rate research practice.
 
As the title of this book suggests, Lareau considers listening to be the core element of interviewing and observation. A researcher must listen to people as she collects data, listen to feedback as she describes what she is learning, listen to the findings of others as they delve into the existing literature on topics, and listen to herself in order to sift and prioritize some aspects of the study over others. By listening in these different ways, researchers will discover connections, reconsider assumptions, catch mistakes, develop and assess new ideas, weigh priorities, ponder new directions, and undertake numerous adjustments—all of which will make their contributions clearer and more valuable.
 
Accessibly written and full of practical, easy-to-follow guidance, this book will help both novice and experienced researchers to do their very best work. Qualitative research is an inherently uncertain project, but with Lareau’s help, you can alleviate anxiety and focus on success.
 
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJul 23, 2021
ISBN9780226806600
Listening to People: A Practical Guide to Interviewing, Participant Observation, Data Analysis, and Writing It All Up
Author

Annette Lareau

Annette Lareau is the Stanley I. Sheerr Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She is faculty member in the Department of Sociology with a secondary appointment in the Graduate School of Education. Lareau is the author of Home Advantage: Social Class and Parental Intervention in Elementary Education (1989; second edition, 2000), and coeditor of Social Class: How Does it Work? (2009); and Education Research on Trial: Policy Reform and the Call for Scientific Rigor (2009); and Journeys through Ethnography: Realistic Accounts of Fieldwork (1996).

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    Listening to People - Annette Lareau

    Cover Page for Listening to People

    Listening to People

    Writing for Social Scientists

    Howard S. Becker

    Telling About Society

    Howard S. Becker

    Tricks of the Trade

    Howard S. Becker

    Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks

    Wendy Laura Belcher

    The Craft of Research

    Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams, Joseph Bizup, and William T. FitzGerald

    From Dissertation to Book

    William Germano

    Getting It Published

    William Germano

    From Notes to Narrative

    Kristen Ghodsee

    Thinking Like a Political Scientist

    Christopher Howard

    Write No Matter What

    Joli Jensen

    How to Write a BA Thesis

    Charles Lipson

    Economical Writing

    Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

    The Chicago Guide to Writing about Numbers

    Jane E. Miller

    Going Public

    Arlene Stein and Jessie Daniels

    The Writer’s Diet

    Helen Sword

    A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations

    Kate L. Turabian

    Student’s Guide to Writing College Papers

    Kate L. Turabian

    Listening to People

    A Practical Guide to Interviewing, Participant Observation, Data Analysis, and Writing It All Up

    Annette Lareau

    The University of Chicago Press

    Chicago and London

    The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

    The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

    © 2021 by The University of Chicago

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

    Published 2021

    Printed in the United States of America

    30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21    1 2 3 4 5

    ISBN-13: 978-0-226-80657-0 (cloth)

    ISBN-13: 978-0-226-80643-3 (paper)

    ISBN-13: 978-0-226-80660-0 (e-book)

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226806600.001.0001

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Names: Lareau, Annette, author.

    Title: Listening to people : a practical guide to interviewing, participant observation, data analysis, and writing it all up / Annette Lareau.

    Other titles: Practical guide to interviewing, participant observation, data analysis, and writing it all up | Chicago guides to writing, editing, and publishing.

    Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Series: Chicago guides to writing, editing, and publishing | Includes bibliographical references and index.

    Identifiers: LCCN 2021003591 | ISBN 9780226806570 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226806433 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226806600 (ebook)

    Subjects: LCSH: Sociology—Methodology. | Social sciences—Methodology. | Social sciences—Fieldwork. | Interviewing in sociology. | Participant observation.

    Classification: LCC HM517 .L37 2021 | DDC 301.01–dc23

    LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021003591

    This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

    For my students at

    University of Pennsylvania,

    University of Maryland,

    Temple University,

    and

    Southern Illinois University,

    with gratitude.

    I have learned so much from

    all of you.

    And,

    for all novices who want to

    do their own study one day.

    Contents

    1   Introduction  The Emergent Nature of the Research Process

    2   Before You Begin  Dreaming and Thinking

    3   Preparing  The Early Steps in a Study

    4   Learning to Interview  What to Do before and after the Interview

    5   How to Conduct a Good Interview  Dig Deep

    6   Learning to Do Participant Observation  A Practical Guide

    7   Writing High-Quality Field Notes  Details Matter

    8   Data Analysis  Thinking as You Go

    9   Writing  Becoming Clearer about Your Contribution

    1o   Conclusion  Why Interviews and Participant Observation Research Are Valuable

    Final Words

    Acknowledgments

    Appendix to Chapter 3: Navigating the Institutional Review Board for the Protection of Human Subjects: Or, How to Manage the IRB Process

    Notes

    Bibliography

    Index

    1

    Introduction

    The Emergent Nature of the Research Process

    Interviews and participant observation studies deepen our knowledge of people, institutions, and social processes. These approaches draw us into the meaning of events in the everyday lives of individuals, showing how people are affected by social structural forces. Well-crafted studies can make us feel as if we are close to the social events being vividly described. For example, while surveys of victims document the size and scope of disasters, in-depth interviews and participant observation can help us grasp unexpected ramifications. In Everything in Its Path, Kai Erikson demonstrates how the collapse of a poorly maintained dam in West Virginia not only released a torrent of water that swept away homes and killed 132 people. The catastrophe also—in part because of how the disaster relief was organized—dissolved key social bonds and feelings of community.

    Relatedly, ethnographers show how people simultaneously live in different overlapping social worlds and reveal how these worlds collide in unexpected ways. For example, professionals routinely enact policies that do not consider multiple institutional pressures, but family members feel the cross-pressures keenly. In Trapped in a Maze, Leslie Paik describes the multi-institutional maze that confines families such as Ms. Catherine, an older woman living with her two teen grandsons and nephew. Ms. Catherine interacts with eleven different institutions; the colliding institutional rules create havoc.¹ Many times, qualitative studies offer a local point of view regarding the meaning of events. This perspective can challenge taken-for-granted assumptions. For example, in his study of defendants going through the criminal justice system, Matthew Clair notes that lawyers were surprised when Black defendants sometimes voluntarily declined an offer of probation and chose instead to go to jail. Clair’s study, Privilege and Punishment, illuminates the logic behind this choice: since the working-class Black defendants were resigned to a high level of police surveillance in their communities, they viewed probation as too risky. Other times scholars can show how very different groups of people have similar experiences, as anthropologist Katherine Newman used interviews with displaced homemakers, air traffic controllers, blue-collar workers, and managers to illuminate the pain of downward mobility.² Because in-depth interviews and participant observation can uncover processes that were previously unknown or underdeveloped in the social science literature, these methods are especially helpful in improving our conceptual models.³

    Many people want to learn how to do high-quality in-depth interviews and participant observation.⁴ In my case, when I was beginning to learn how to do this kind of research, the literature I read left me feeling stumped. I could not find the advice I needed. The books seemed overly prescriptive. They informed me that I should sensitively probe in interviews, but they didn’t describe what that looked like, nor did they seem to recognize sufficiently the difficulties inherent in probing. As I read methodological appendices, I was especially frustrated when researchers who had carried out a participant observation study described gaining entry into a field setting as the result of a serendipitous event. How was I supposed to replicate such serendipity as I sought to break into a setting? Books about interviews and observation made it seem like doing a study would be relatively smooth sailing, but in my experience, it was not. I yearned to read a book that was more realistic and practical.

    In pursing my interest in a deeper understanding of how people think, act, and make sense of their everyday lives, I also have been struck by studies that had wonderful, unrealized potential: the authors designed great projects, gained impressive access, spent a great deal of time collecting data, either by interviewing many people or writing countless field notes, and wrote clearly. Despite all of these very promising elements, the final products fell short. How did that happen? What went wrong? In some cases, the works didn’t have data of sufficiently high quality to offer readers the rich, vivid feeling of being there. The lack of in-depth data made it hard to assess the basis for the authors’ claims. I was bothered by researchers who essentially told readers to trust them because they had collected a great deal of data since I wanted these authors to show their readers the data they found to be persuasive. In other cases, authors provided plenty of data, but their arguments lacked focus. Sometimes, the arguments were clear, but the research questions were narrowly conceived and, worse, the authors had not considered alternative explanations. In a few instances, a single error—whether in design, data collection, or analysis—was so consequential that it dramatically reduced the value of the study. How could similar studies yield work of such wildly different quality? The qualitative methodology books I read didn’t answer this question.

    These challenges—that methods books are not practical enough and that potentially wonderful studies can flounder—led me to write this book. In Listening to People, I give concrete, practical advice for actually doing a wide variety of studies including class projects, theses, articles, and books. After all, novice researchers can encounter very hard problems and still manage to produce outstanding studies. In addition, since even experienced researchers inevitably face difficulties, I offer a more realistic account of the research process than appears in many other works. I also stress the inherently uncertain nature of the research process, and the importance not only of talking to others but also of listening to feedback from others while conducting research. As the title of this book suggests, I consider listening to be the core of in-depth interviewing and participant observation. You must listen to people as you collect data, listen to feedback from others as you describe what you are learning during data collection, listen to the findings of others as you delve into the existing literature on topics that interest you, and listen to yourself as you sort through and prioritize some aspects of your study over others. As you engage in listening in these different ways, you will discover connections, reconsider assumptions, catch mistakes, develop and assess new ideas, weigh priorities, ponder new directions, and undertake numerous adjustments, all of which ultimately will make your contribution clearer and more valuable.

    What Does Emergent Mean? Thinking as You Go

    In analog photography, the film is developed, and prints are made in a darkroom. There, you use a machine to enlarge and then briefly expose the image onto white photographic paper, and subsequently you immerse the paper in a chemical bath. At first, the paper is completely blank. But then your photograph begins to take shape—very gradually and unevenly. It may even be hard to recognize the image when it is beginning to emerge, but very slowly the picture comes to life. If the image is too light or too dark, you return to the machine and change the amount of time you burn (give the image more light) or dodge (withhold light on part of the picture) to create a balanced photograph. Then, you put the new paper into the chemical bath, watch for the image to emerge, and finally plunge it into a stop bath when you are satisfied with the picture.

    There are important differences between developing pictures and allowing insights to emerge from your interviews and participant observation research, but the slow taking shape of focus is similar. In addition, in interviews and participant observation, there is a lot of adjusting and changing as you go along—particularly in the first half of the study process. Thus, it is common for interviewers and participant observers to not really know what they are doing for a long time. If this happens, you may feel confused and uncertain. You may not quite understand how your study fits into the intellectual debates in the field. You may not know what is new and exciting. Or, you may feel overwhelmed and be convinced that your study is a big mess. All of this uncertainty and worry is normal. As you do interviews or hang out in a setting, many new questions surface. You have to make many decisions based on incomplete information—should you probe this or that, should you spend time with this person or that person, why are you doing this study, and what do you hope to learn? Since social life is complex, there are always multiple intellectual pathways present within any given study. As a result, you need to be constantly thinking as you go.

    As I explain in a discussion of data analysis in chapter 8, there is also not only one right way to sculpt your study. In that chapter, I present the case of a student who was doing a study of dog owners and was struggling to choose among multiple reasonable research questions. He couldn’t address them all, and for a while he was uncertain. Gradually, however, he settled on one intellectual direction, and he let the others go. In my own case, when I was a doctoral student and met regularly with Arlie Hochschild to discuss my research, she would listen attentively as I described another new idea I had, but then she would say kindly, "You know, that is a great idea! But why don’t you set that idea aside for another paper. Let’s focus." As I learned to develop a focus, the core ideas of my study emerged more clearly.

    Why is focus so important? It is hard for readers (or for any audience) to absorb a story that is really four or five different stories. When a writer hops from point to point, or when a speaker presents a lot of examples that are interesting but don’t fit together clearly, the audience can become confused, bored, or impatient. As a reader, you may have had the experience of reading a long paper and not really understanding why the author wrote it. (Was there a key idea? What was it?) Or, you may have read something with so many different ideas and examples it was hard to get the overall argument straight. Do not underestimate how difficult it can be for readers to simply follow an argument. If you have a clear focus, it helps your audience understand what key idea you are trying to convey.

    When you first start doing interviews and participant observation, however, finding a clear focus is difficult. Sometimes it is impossible—even if you have read other relevant studies very carefully and thought a great deal about your topic. Normally it is only by collecting data, and thinking about the literature, honing your question, and collecting more data, that your focus slowly takes shape. Similar to the image in a darkroom, your focus emerges over time.

    One more point about the emergent nature of interviewing and doing participant observation: You often have to act as if you know what you are doing. To gain access to a research setting and research subjects, you must explain the purpose of your study. Furthermore, people who read and review research proposals, funding applications, institutional review board (IRB) applications, dissertation proposals, and so forth usually expect you to tell them the purpose of your study. At this stage, they want to know what you are thinking, and they want to make sure that you haven’t overlooked anything. They may be especially concerned that you think through the impact of your study on the research participants. What you say in applications and proposals is, by definition, inherently speculative, since the true focus of your study can only become clear as you move through data collection and data analysis. Adjustment and change are integral to the process of interviewing and participant observation.

    William Strunk Jr., author of the classic English usage guide The Elements of Style, once advised his students at Cornell University, If you don’t know how to pronounce a word, say it loud! The writer E. B. White, who later revised Elements, endorsed this guidance and added: Why compound ignorance with inaudibility?⁵ In the case of preparing a proposal or funding application for a study using interviewing and participant observation, you want to clearly state your preliminary research question and then outline how you plan to proceed: you will gain access, collect data (specifying your methodological approach), be sensitive to particular problems (listing examples), and use these possible solutions (listing examples) to the possible problems. You will consult with advisors. It is also important to express tremendous enthusiasm and excitement about your study. It will be valuable! You will learn important things! You are aware of possible hiccups, but you have a plan for addressing those!

    Although in some ways the entire exercise of writing a research plan is deeply contingent, it is also the best you can do. You are sharing what you know when you know it. As you learn more, you will adjust your study. The emergent nature of the work also means that you don’t want to wait too long before you start collecting data. Once you start that step, many things will shift, and you will have new questions. This is all normal and appropriate. At some point, ideally around halfway through your data collection, you want to settle on your highest intellectual priorities, begin to focus your data collection on your central research question, look for data to support your emerging argument, seriously consider alternative explanations, and begin to think about the kinds of data you need to nail your argument. As I explain in later chapters, your research question, understanding of the literature, and focus of data collection will all evolve. You don’t want to get to the end of the study without a clear focus. But, at the beginning, you want to loudly and confidently act as if you have a clear plan. That plan is to get permission to do the research, begin your study, and do the best you can. That is good enough.

    Organization of This Book

    I begin, in chapter 2, with planning. Despite important differences, interviewers and ethnographers face many similar challenges. I take up the thinking and decision making that happen in the earliest stages of a project, particularly designing the study, choosing whom to study, and making difficult trade-offs. I also provide an overview of the research journey. Chapter 3 is about preparing by getting ready. Here I discuss navigating the IRB as well as practical matters such as handling food, clothing, and safety while collecting data. I also discuss the tricky issue of recruiting people for your study and gaining access.

    Then, I devote two chapters to interviewing. Chapter 4 is about everything but the interview, including planning before an interview, constructing an interview guide, packing an interview bag, and thanking study participants. Chapter 5 takes you through two real-life interviews, using long excerpts from an interview done by a novice and one done by a more experienced interviewer. The excerpts are accompanied by boxed commentary where I point out what probes worked well and which were less successful.

    Chapter 6, which begins a two-chapter discussion of participant observation, takes up some of the key challenges associated with doing participant observation: introducing yourself to people at your study site, defining your role in the field, scheduling fieldwork, and avoiding common mistakes (e.g., forgetting to eat before going into the field, putting off writing up your field notes for more than twenty-four hours after a visit). I also take up other challenges in terms of what to talk about, how to respond to participants’ requests for help, and the reality that it may be hard to get yourself out the door to do fieldwork. Chapter 7 offers concrete examples of high-quality and low-quality field notes and shows how underdeveloped field notes can be improved dramatically.

    One theme running through this book is that you have to think as you go. It is best to carry out data analysis at every point in the research project—as you design your study, collect data, refine your focus, collect more data, code, and write up the results. But, despite the ongoing nature of the work, it is helpful to pause and systematically compare and contrast what you have learned through coding. Chapter 8 focuses on this formal phase of coding in data analysis. Chapter 9 turns to the challenge of writing, clearly stating an argument, providing ample data to support your claims, discussing disconfirming evidence, and building a conclusion. In chapter 10, the book’s conclusion, I revisit the value of doing this kind of work, the limited impact of most mistakes, and the gift that the inexperienced bring to the table. I offer some final words about the importance of having faith throughout the process.

    How to Use This Book

    Listening to People is intended to be read from beginning to end and to be revisited when you are facing a particular task or wrestling with a specific problem. As a result, I usually briefly define key terms in each chapter so that they can be understood in that context. Throughout, the focus is on doing in-depth interviews and participant observation. Although these two approaches are arguably the most common qualitative methods used in the social sciences, they are not the only methods. Other related, and overlapping, methods include focus groups, autoethnography, content analysis of documents, portraiture, the extended case method, and mixed methods—to name only a few.⁶ Due to space constraints, these methods are not taken up here. Many forms of qualitative research, however, feature key elements—including research design, aspects of data collection (e.g., probes in interviewing), data analysis, and writing—similar to those of interviewing and participant observation. Thus, I am hopeful that Listening to People will be widely helpful.

    Since writers are often told to write what you know, in the chapters ahead, I have provided a number of examples from my own research in the field of sociology. These studies, which have used participant observation and interviews, often focus on the influence of social class and race on key aspects of family life, including child rearing, family-school relationships, and school choice. I have also been involved in studies of wealthy families, the upwardly mobile, and refugee families. Of course, in addition to studying individuals, interviews and participant observation methods are excellent for illuminating organizational dynamics, political groups, and broader social systems. I hope that as you read, you will focus on the topics of interest to you within your discipline; many of these likely will attend less to the daily lives of people and more to the functioning of organizations across the globe.

    You will find that in addition to examples from sociology, Listening to People draws on work from other fields. Moreover, I asked colleagues in other disciplines for their advice and gathered helpful insights from outside academia, as well. I share these tips and suggestions in boxes throughout the book. Across the social sciences, there are excellent studies using interviews and participant observation, and, unfortunately, there was room to list only a fraction of them here. To broaden the available repertoire of resources, I cite excellent older, less frequently read works along with a very small number of current works. The bibliography also contains works on methodology that have helped me; the index is a valuable roadmap to general topics and specific discussions. Since this book is meant to be a practical guide, I don’t explore the theoretical roots of in-depth interviewing and participant observation, nor do I examine issues related to these methods that are frequently discussed in the literature. Theoretical models also vary across disciplines, and the role theory can effectively play in guiding your research is not taken up here.⁸ Nor do I enter the debates on the relative merits of interviews and participant observation.⁹ The vigorous discussion of the proper use of social science research in public life is also set aside.¹⁰ Furthermore, while it is clear individuals enter the research process from different, and unequal, social positions, these important issues are also not the focus of this book—though they do surface in a variety of ways.¹¹

    This book seeks to be a friendly companion as you learn how to design, begin, collect data, analyze, and write up a study using in-depth interviews and participant observation. Your journey carrying out this kind of research can be exciting. While many important studies can be done in an office sitting in front of a computer, crucial aspects of interviews and participant observation are done out in the world, listening to people, by hanging out with them or by formally interviewing them, or by using both of these methods. Just as traveling to and exploring a new place can be thrilling because you are immersed in a different social world, doing this research can be a powerful experience that is different from your usual life. There are, however, many potentially challenging aspects to interviewing and observing, including significant imbalances between researchers and participants with respect to power and status.¹² These are issues that require you to be both vigilant and deeply sensitive to the way you conduct your research and to how your study affects your participants and the communities they are a part of. Ethnographic work also is contradictory at times since, as I show in subsequent chapters, you need to be systematic and rigorous with respect to key aspects of your study but sensitive and highly flexible in other areas. The work also can be tiring, even exhausting. Still, in-depth interviewing and participant observation studies not only deepen our understanding of crucial issues. They can also be a memorable and transformative life experience for those who use these methods. If you would like to carry out a study, I recommend doing so. You can learn a great deal about yourself and others. More importantly, the knowledge you generate—about people, groups, institutions, and social processes—can change how others understand the world.

    2

    Before You Begin

    Dreaming and Thinking

    Beginnings are exciting—the moments when everything is ahead of you and filled with possibility. Beginnings are also a time for key decisions. Studies using interviewing and participant observation face common challenges from the very beginning, and this chapter takes up these earliest moments. Doing some daydreaming is a very important first step. As you begin to focus your daydreaming, you choose a topic from your list of enticing potential studies, frame a preliminary research question, and consider a number of important design decisions. Then, it’s a good idea to assess, realistically, the other obligations in your life—obligations that might shape the breadth and depth of the research you are able to undertake. This chapter takes on these initial design decisions and provides an overview of the research journey. Since one of your goals is to create excellent work, I also briefly discuss widely established criteria of outstanding work. In the next chapter, I take up the various steps in translating your plans to reality.

    Dreaming: Conceptualizing a Study

    But first, the dreaming. What would you love to do? Whom do you want to study? What kinds of studies do you find satisfying? Why do you admire some studies? What studies do you find unsatisfying? Why are they problematic?

    In answering these questions about other research, you can begin to assess your dreams in light of the existing field. At this stage of the process, as long as your project is ethical, nothing is out of bounds. Even if the goal seems outlandish because access to a site is highly restricted (e.g., following around a professional football team, seeing how network news is produced), it is important to elucidate your private hopes and dreams—the rumblings inside your soul—to give them careful thought. As noted earlier, there are many forms of listening. Here, you are listening to your own inner voice. You also want to talk to others and listen to the expertise they share. Reading other studies also helps you listen to established knowledge. As you daydream about your future study, it is helpful to identify studies that can act as role models. But you also might want to do something that has not yet been done. And, here, even if you get negative feedback, keep in mind that the naysayers are not always right. For example, when I was starting my second project, which involved visiting families with young children inside their homes on a daily basis for almost a month, many people, including colleagues, friends, and graduate students, told me flat out that it could not be done: families would not give me permission. Their harsh assessment scared me. But they were wrong, and the research I completed led to my book Unequal Childhoods. Similarly, when Rachel Ellis was a graduate student and wanted to do a one-year ethnography in a women’s prison for her dissertation, one famous professor told her it would be very difficult and maybe even impossible.¹ But it was not impossible. Colleagues scoffed at the idea that Katharina Hecht would be able to interview high-income earners in London, but, by working with their personal assistants, she gained access.² If I were really excited about a possible idea for a study, I would not necessarily listen to naysayers. I would try to begin the study three, four, or five times, try to trim your focus to one key aspect, or tailor it in other ways before I truly gave up on it. As always, however, you want to daydream about a question that you want to answer and are able to answer through the distinctive strengths of interviewing and participant observation, which are understanding social processes and their meanings to participants.³

    Thinking: Developing a Research Design

    After the dreamy all things are possible time comes the consideration of the cold, harsh facts. As I explain shortly, there are many trade-offs in designing a high-quality study, and you need the time to be there in a field site or to conduct interviews. The nature of the study design varies—undergraduates do different studies than graduate students or senior scholars. Although the key issue is what you want to learn, you want to consider how much time you have to conduct the research, and working backwards, when your written product needs to be done. You also will weigh the relative merits of doing interviews (described in more detail in chapters 4 and 5) or participant observation (discussed at length in chapters 6 and 7).⁴ A key decision will be whether you choose to study one group or do a comparison of the experiences of two or more groups.⁵

    Put differently, you need a research design. As you begin to mull over a possible study, you might reflect on what you hope to be doing in your study. For example, what exactly do you want to observe and why? What is most important? If you are visiting a site (such as a school), why are you there? What are you hoping to learn? As a participant observer, how much will you aim to be a participant and how much will you aim to be an observer? If you are interviewing people, whom do you want to interview? Why do you need to speak with them? What can they teach you? What don’t you know? There usually are not right or wrong answers to these questions. Rather, it depends on your goals. In the beginning, you might not be sure of the purpose of your study, but you will have some thoughts. Gradually, you can figure out your central goal.

    Since interview and participant observation studies almost always unfold over time in unpredictable ways, any research design will need to be flexible. Making an ideal plan ahead of time is reasonable, and it can be helpful for others who are helping you (e.g., advisors, granting agencies). That said, it is appropriate to adjust the plan once you begin since often things do not work out as anticipated. And do make adjustments rather than persist with a problematic course. For example, in an interview study, you might revise your questions in the middle to drop ones that prove to be tone deaf or add new questions that allow you to explore an important, emerging issue. In a participant observation study, you might find that things are unfolding very differently than expected, or you might not end up focusing on what you originally intended to study, but you have gained interesting insights on a related topic and earned the trust of others. There is nothing problematic or shameful about adjusting as you go along. It is normal.⁶ Indeed, a strength of interviews and participant observation research is that you can be responsive to what you learn in your setting.

    Sometimes this means that, in reality, you do not ask the first one-third of your sample a question that surfaces as the study goes along. Clearly, this is not ideal, but it is unarguably better to deepen your analysis based on new insights. Does this mean that you may not have asked every person the same question, and when you want to make a table you might have incomplete data? Yes. Is this difficult? Yes. Is it avoidable? No. As discussed in chapter 1, it’s important to remember that the findings of ethnographic research are emergent.

    Settling on a Focus of Your Study

    The choice of conducting interviews or participant observation depends on the research question or, put differently, what you want to know. Interviews are particularly valuable for learning how people understand key aspects of their lives. Participant observation is especially helpful for unpacking social mechanisms. Of course, some studies use both. For sensitive topics that require deep trust, having an ongoing relationship with participants (through participant observation) can be valuable, and, in some cases, essential.

    In interview studies, researchers focus their questions and recruit people who can teach them what they want to know. Interviews often center on meaning making: how people understand their social positions, barriers they believe that they have faced, worries they have about their children or their jobs or their health, or accomplishments that have generated pride. In organizational studies, interviews can help you understand how the organization does, and does not, work. In conducting interviews, you want to choose a group of people who are best positioned to help you understand the topic that interests you. Your interviewees must be experts on your chosen topic. For example, doctors can talk knowledgeably about providing care but not about how patients experience medical care.

    For a participant observation study, you want to be sure to choose a research site that allows you to observe people interacting with others. Hence, doing an observation of people watching a movie is not usually an ideal choice because the people in the study are not generally interacting with each other in an observable fashion. (Studying a group of people creating a video would be better.) If you are interested in how people develop romance and sexual relations, it would be ideal to follow people on dates. Such a study, however, would be extremely intrusive, and it would be difficult to not influence the interactions you are observing.⁸ It might be better to hang out in bars, fraternity parties, or other places where budding romances and flirtations can be observed. In a different vein, if a researcher is interested in religion, attending religious services is only a preliminary step. For example, to understand an evangelical congregation, it is important to be able to hang out with people as they do missionary work, feed the homeless, study the Bible, or otherwise interact in small groups. The critical point is that the site must be a place where people are there to interact. If you are interested in understanding social interactions that are not tied to a specific location, it might be better to embed yourself in a group of people rather than in a specific site (you may even choose to follow members of the group across various sites), such as joining a group of birdwatchers, a sorority, or a campus religious group.

    The Research Design: Your Study and Its Contribution to the World of Ideas

    One study cannot do everything. Both before beginning, and during the study, you will need to make hard choices. Broadly conceived, each research project is limited by specific key resources (time, money, accessibility, and so forth). And, as I elaborate shortly, there are many conflicting priorities in choosing both a group to study and a location to study them (at least initially). How do you decide? The answer, I believe, is connected to the tentative idea of what you want to study. What is your research question? What are you trying to learn? What steps will you take to gain the knowledge you seek? For help in navigating these issues, think about the broader ideas that will guide your work, as well as your theoretical goals.

    Indeed, researchers differ in their relationships to the world of ideas. Partly, you can gain guidance in making these (hard) decisions by considering the kinds of studies you admire. Many people admire studies of topics or groups. You might think, I want to study homelessness. I want to study sororities. I want to study doctors. I want to study engineers. These are examples of research topics. Some people are very comfortable doing a rich, descriptive study of a group. There are influential studies of communities or organizations such as Andrew Deener’s Venice, about a beach community in California; David Grazian’s study, American Zoo; or Gary Alan Fine’s books on the culture of restaurant work (Kitchens), debate teams (Gifted Tongues), or baseball teams (With the Boys). These studies contain deep questions about practices and processes; they teach us how social groups, communities, or organizations function. This is a goal in and of itself. Broadly conceived, these studies often help us understand nuances and processes in how these organizations work, particularly in terms of how organizations meet, or don’t meet, their mission.

    Other scholars use their study as

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