Participant Observation Exercise

This exercise is for the class on Participation Observation. You need to get started on it well before the date of the actual class (see schedule). Which means you have to do the reading for the Participation Observation class now. Note that, as with all class exercises, you are welcome to do them in groups of 2 or 3.

In this exercise, you need to find a set of people to both talk to and observe. Early on, you should establish a clear research question -- what are you trying to find out? One effective strategy is to focus on a process or mechanism that relates inputs to outputs. For example, you are interested in how a clerk's personality and appearance affect how the customer reacts to them. Note that the question is not whether personality and appearance affect customer reactions, but how they relate to each other.

It will be helpful if you review this handout on ethnographic interviewing for this assignment:

• Borgatti. Notes on Spradley

I find it is often fruitful to focus on implicit decision-making. For example, go to the school cafeteria and look at people distribute themselves at tables. Who is sitting where? The interest is not in describing the patterns, but to find out why it is happening. You can think of it as building modeling the decision process that people are using. Consider another example. How do people decide which stall to use in the office bathroom? What are all the factors that get considered, consciously or unconsciously? Is it a lexicographic process -- like an ordered set of if-then questions? Here's a Labrador Retriever decision model:

Or is it a compensatory model in which all criteria are considered simultaneously, with different weights? For example, a tenure decision typically considers a person's record on three formal dimensions: research, teaching and service. Normally, research is weighted the most, and service is a distant third.

An easy study to do would be to go to the "food court" in Bowman's Den and find out why people sit where they do. You would use a combination of observation and informal interviewing (which you should tape to get exact quotes).

Another useful approach is to take a puzzle and try to figure out what's happening. For example, read this interesting Freakonomics bit, which describes how fining parents for picking up their kids late from daycare turns out to worsen the problem. It would seem counter-intuitive that assessing a penalty for doing something actually makes the behavior happen more. An ethnographic study could talk to parents and see how day-care fits into their lives and figure out an answer. You want to work out the mechanism that transforms the input (the X variable, the fining of parents) into the output (the Y variable, picking kids up late).