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Participant observation - Coggle Diagram
Participant observation
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Making contact
making initial contact depends on personal skills, having the right connections, or even pure chance
Polsky - was a good pool player and found his skill useful in gaining entry onto the world of the poolroom hustler
Patrick - able to join a Glasgow gang as he looked quite young and knew on of its members from having taught him in a young offenders school
Farhurst - found herself hospitalised with back pain and used the opportunity to stdy what it was like to be a patient
Acceptance
the researcher will have to win trust and acceptance and may help to make friends with a key individual
Thornton - made friends with Kate at the clubbing and rave scene but found her age and nationality as a barrier
sometimes though the researcher's age, gender, class or ethnicity may be a stumbling block for them
Liebow - succeeded in gaining acceptance by a black street corner gang in Washington DC despite him being white
Griffin - a white man who used medication and sun beds to change his skin colour and pass as black. He then travelled around the Deep South USA, experiencing first hand the impact of white racism
The observer's role
the role the researcher should adopt is one that does not disrupt the group's normal patterns and offer a good vantage point from which to make observations
Whyte - succeeded in achieving these aims by refusing leadership roles with the one exception of secretary of the community club, a position that allowed him to take ample notes under the guise of taking the minutes of meetings
it is not always impossible to take a role both unobtrusive and a good vantage point as some roles may involve taking sides in conflicts, with the result that the researcher may become estranged from one faction of the other, making observation more difficult
Staying in
we can see a key problem of the participant observer having to be both involved in the group so as to understand it fully and yet detached from the group as to remain objective and unbiased
Going native
danger of staying in the group is that of becoming over involved or going native and by over identifying with the group the researcher becomes biased. When this happens they stop being the observer and become a member of the group
Punch - in striving to be accepted he over identified and started acting as a policeman himself - chasing and holding aspects, searching houses, cars and people and shouting at people who abused his police colleagues
at the other extreme the researcher may remain detached to avoid bias but they risk not understanding the events they observe
the more time the observer spend with the group, the more normal their behaviour comes and the researcher may cease to notice things that would have struck them as unusual or noteworthy at an earlier stage - the observer becomes less observant
Getting out
practically - getting out poses less problems than entering the group or staying in the group because if worse comes to worse the researcher can leave
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re entering ones world can be difficult as Whyte found when he returned to Harvard University after his research, he was unable to communicate with fellow academics and these problems can be made worse if the research is conducted on and off over a period of time with multiple 'crossings' between the two worlds
the researcher may find loyalty prevents them from fully disclosing everything they have learnt, for fear that this might harm members of the group
Overt observation
Advantages
avoids ethical problem of obtaining information by deceit and when studying deviant groups that of being expected to join in their activities
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Covert observation
Practical
ADVANTAGE - reduces the risk of altering peoples behaviour and may be only way to obtain valid information and especially common when people are doing activities they want to be hidden
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ADVANTAGE - if they knew they were being observed they would change or conceal their behaviour and so the main advantage of observation - that it preserves the naturalness of peoples behaviour
DISADVANTAGES - requires researcher to keep up an act and may call for detailed knowledge of the groups way of life even before joining it
DISADVANTAGES - always a risk of ones cover being blown by a trivial mistake and is likely to bring the research to an abrupt end and may, in the case of some criminal groups, lead to physical harm
DISADVANTAGES - sociologist cannot take notes openly and must rely on memory and the opportunity to write them in secret
DISADVANTAGES - the researcher cannot ask naive but important questions or combine observation with other methods such as interviews
DISADVANTAGES - pretending to be an insider than an outsider reduces the Hawthorne Effects but an addition of a new member can still change the groups behaviour, reducing validity
Ethical
DISADVANTAGE - deception - researches should gain informed consent but with covert this can not be done
DISADVANTAGE - have to lie about their reasons fir leaving the group and for their own safety they have to make sure they get away with their data and is immoral as it means abandoning people you have a bond with
DISADVANTAGE - have to participate in immoral or illegal activities that the group do in order to not raise suspicion that they are an outsider to the group
Advantages
Validity
the only way of seeing true behaviour is to observe it yourself and can also gain you good in depth data
Insight
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by living as a member of the group we can gain insight into their way of life, their meanings and viewpoints, their values and problems. We can understand their life world as they themselves understand it. Can give uniquely valid, authentic data
Flexibility
more flexible than interviews and questionnaires as rather than starting with a fixed hypothesis, it allows the sociologist to enter the situation with a relatively open mind about what they will find
as new situations are encountered, new explanations can be formukated and can change direction to follow them up there and then
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Practical
groups are likely to be suspicious of outsiders so participant observation may be the only viable method for studying certain groups
Yablonsky - a teenage gang is likely to see a researcher coming in with questionnaires as an unwelcome authority
this builds rapport with the groups so successful in studying deviant groups such as football hooligans and gangs
Cicourel - study how police officers make unconscious assumptions so cannot ask questions about the assumptions when they are unaware of them themselves so the only way to get at these assumptions is to observe the police directly in their work
Disadvantages
Practical
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personally stressful and demanding, especially in covert
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things such as age, gender or ethnicity may restrict what kinds of groups can be studied
groups may not be wished to be studied in this way and some have the power to make access difficult and why participant observation often focuses on relatively powerless groups who are less able to resist being studied, such as petty criminals
Ethical
deception to obtain information about people and participating in illegal or immoral activities in the course of the research
Representativeness
the group studied is usually very small and the 'sample' is often selected haphazardly, for example by a chance encounter with someone who turns out to be a key informant
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Reliability
so much depends on personal skills ad characteristics of a lone researcher that it is unlikely any other investigator would be able to replicate the original study
usually produces qualitative data and can make comparisons with other studies difficult so unlikely to produce reliable data
Positivists who see sociology as a science reject participant observations as an unsystematic method that cannot be replicated by other researchers
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Validity
allowing the sociologist to become an insider gives an authentic account of the actors' world (verstehen)
positivists disagree and argue the findings are subjective and biased rather than telling it like it is
it does not impose the sociologists own categories and ideas on the facts but positivists argue in reality the researcher selects what facts they think are worth recording and that these are likely to fit in with the researchers' pre existing views and prejudices
a threat to validity is the hawthorne effect as the very presence of the researcher may make them act diferently
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