Participant Observation Assignment
Assignment Description: This assignment asks you to collect and interpret information about an event, activity or social space through participant-observation. Do not use any interview techniques to learn about the occasion you have chosen, although supplementary knowledge you have from prior experience may be included in your discussion if you are careful to distinguish between information acquired from your observation and prior knowledge. Please confirm your proposed venue with the TA (Alex) before you begin! (it may be necessary for you to receive permission from authorities to make your observations).
Here are some suggestions for research sites:
- A large, complex event that occurs only occasionally — e.g., a political rally or street festival. Or a special-occasion ritual event that takes place regularly such as a religious celebration, a wedding, a graduation, etc.
- Behavior typical of certain situations — e.g., mornings in a convenience store, performing jury duty, riding public transportation, shopping in a grocery store, visiting a museum, touring typical tourist destinations, attending a theater performance, etc.
This assignment is weighted more to your analysis, your “read” of the situation. Show me that you’re acquiring the skills of “seeing” as an ethnographer! To be sure you gather enough data to generate significant opportunity for analysis, here are some things to keep in mind while taking field notes:
- Describe the scene, paying attention all sensory perception. If it seems useful, draw a map of the setting, indicating the position and movement of persons. Who is present? Who is absent?
- Look for the structure of the situation: are the participants differentiated from each other, as, e.g., leaders and followers, or those with more or less status? Is status differentiation or equality represented in dress, behavior, symbolic markers, differing prerogatives? How do people interact with each other?
- Are there any elements of ritual, either formal or informal, in what you observe? How do you interpret the meaning and effect of these ritualized behaviors?
- What appear to be the unspoken – or spoken — rules that underlie this event or activity? Is there any mechanism for correcting a distortion or a mistake? Is there any formal authority? To what extent is it respected? Do people seem to follow the rules, explicit or tacit, or do they bend them?
- Is the event characterized more by order and agreement or conflict and disorder?
- Do all participants seem to be deriving the same benefits or satisfactions from participation? Do they have means of communicating positive or negative judgments about the situation?
- Are there stylized actions or modes of self-presentation that seem characteristic of this event? Do the participants seem aware of them? What purpose do they serve?
- What shared values or assumptions are reinforced (or contested) through this event?
PLEASE pick an interesting subject — something you’re genuinely curious about — but also one that is not so familiar to you.
Turn in:
your raw field notes as well as your post-hoc typed elaboration of your handwritten notes
your summary, descriptive write-up of the observation (scene-setting and highlights)
your analysis and interpretation of the scene (using the above questions as a guide)
your self-critique — be sure to touch on both epistemological and ethical issues of research
e.g., to what extent did you ‘participate’ and to what extent did you ‘observe’? How did the two inform each other? Comment on the effect (hopefully minimal) of your presence and the degree to which you understood the activity without having directly questioned the participants. What do you think you might have misunderstood or missed?
4 or more typewritten pages not including field notes.
Specific examples:
Symphony concert
Ice hockey as a spectator sport
Ballroom dance competition
Homeless persons around Central Square and pedestrians’ interactions (and avoidance)
Fraternity party
Sunday services at the St. Paul’s African Methodist Episcopal Church
The waiting room at Massachusetts General Hospital
Hotel lobby
Blood Drive
Subway riding during peak and off-peak times
Use of public space in a coffee shop/train station
other suggestions: food bank or soup kitchen; courthouse; walking around a very wealthy and/or impoverished neighborhood in your location; a college tour of a school other than your own
