You have probably already conducted some interview or observation sessions for the
study you are doing in connection with your reading of this book, because you can
not help doing so if you are involved at all in doing a study. Gathering information
is what most people normally think of as doing research. Hopefully, by the time you read
this chapter, you will agree with the theme of the book, that none of the inquiry
activities stands alone. The acts of observing, interviewing, and using documents
or artifacts involve all the other activities too--
*asking questions,
*interpreting experience,
*sharing what is learned with others,
*building on relationships with others,
*keeping a record,
*acting out assumptions and beliefs about the nature of the world, and
*developing your unique inquirer's role.
This presentation will focus on the explicit data collection activities of observing,
interviewing, and reviewing documents. But please keep the holomovement metaphor,
gutlined in Chapter One and rehearsed in every other chapter, in mind as you read
this chapter.
Many authors have written about ways of collecting information in schools and other
educational settings from "outsider" and professional researcher perspectives. Books
by Gay (1987) and Borg and Gall (1983) include chapters on the use of questionnaires, tests, and experimental design, in addition to observation, interviewing, and document
review. Their audiences are educational researchers, other than the educators involved.
Gther authors (e.g., Bogden and Biklen (1982), Lincoln and Guba (1985), Spradley (1979 and 1980)) have focused on the latter three gathering approaches which are
more "naturalistic" but they too have rarely assumed that the teachers, principals,
or other "insiders" who are not professional researchers in the school where the
research is being done would be the main inquirers.
There has been an increasing number of authors (see Boody, 1992 and Burgess, 1985
for several references) who have promoted the notions of "action research" and "reflective
practice" which are very compatible with the educator-as-learner approach to eductional inquiry being promoted in this book. These authors seem to agree that educators
should use data gathering techniques that are compatible with their teaching and
other regular activities and which will yield information and experiences they can
use to improve their practice. Although many of the methods reviewed by general texts on
educational research could
be used by educators to yield useful information, the need for specialized skills
in test and questionnaire design and selection, statistical analysis, and manipulation
of curriculum and instruction are often prohibitive for busy educators. Therefore,
the focus of this book is on those procedures that seem most natural for educators--
observation, interviewing, and review of documents.
The challenge for educators is to translate the good ideas for collecting information
that educational researchers promote into procedures that are workable for educators-as-inquirers,
in concert with all the other activities they engage in as teachers and administrators. We will take this challenge by showing an example of one educator
who used her position, relationships, and purposes as an assistant principal to invite
others in the school to join her in conducting a research study. This study, in
conjunction with the others illustrated throughout the book will be used to note several
practical ways educators can adapt the data collection procedures of naturalistic
inquiry by full time researchers to their unique purposes. We hope you will see
these as possibilities, not boundaries on ways you could collect information in your own setting.
An Assistant Principal's Story
An assistant principal, Judith Hehr (1992) conducted a study in her elementary school
for a doctoral dissertation. As in the other stories told in this book, her study
was an outgrowth of questions and experiences she had before the study was even proposed. She mostly interviewed students, teachers, and parents associated with retention
of children in first grade. She also observed the students in various activities
throughout the school and examined records and school work produced by the students&
An article-length version of Judy's study is presented in Appendix F: An Example Study by an Assistant Principal, along with selections
from her dissertation that give more details on the gathering procedures she used.
After you read her story there, please continue in the remainder of this chapter
to consider an analysis of her experience in terms of information collection issues.
What can we learn from Judy's experience about observing, interviewing, and reviewing
documents? What can you use from her experience in your owf setting? We will examine
her study for some general lessons and for specific guidance on observing, interviewing, and reviewing documents.
General Lessons
One of the most obvious lessons to be learned from Judy's experience is that her data collection activities
and those used by other inquirers reviewed in this book used natural human skills
such as talking, listening, seeing, and thinking that were tailored, focused, and
combined differently for particular purposes depending on the nature of the situation under study. The customized nature of data
collection procedures in naturalistic inquiry makes it difficult to discuss information
gathering techniques in a standardized way. But keep in mind that you should tailor your collection activities to the requirements imposed by the questions you are
asking, the relationships you are developing with people in your study, the kinds
of records you are keeping, and by otherwise meshing collection with the other naturalistic inquiry activities.
4BR>
For example, Judy spent more of her energy interviewing
because she wanted to understand the experience of retention from the viewpoints
of the participants. And she interviewed the children differently than she interviewed
their parents and the teachers. She also observed
the children in classes and at recess to confirm what they were telling her. In
terms of document review
, she used students' products (e.g., artwork, writing) and documents the school kept
(e.g., report cards, cumulative files, exams) as supporting evidence. She also used
journals kept by the teachers to confirm what she was learning through other means.
This was not an observation study like K's was (see Appendix D) and it was not
a document review study like Marné's was (see Appendix B). It was essentially an
interview study that used other sources of information and means of gathering to
confirm what was learned through interviews.
Another obvious lesson from Judy's experience is that she recognized and welcomed
the fact that she could not conduct this study alone
. She needed the help of what she called a "research team" and involved teachers
in the school with her in collecting and interpreting information about the lived
experiences of the children targeted for this study. Clearly, each of these inquirers
had different interviewing styles. They played very different "participant-observer" roles,
and they had access to different kinds of artifacts produced by students to use in
making sense of what they were hearing and seeing. As she says in the article, "The
researchers were constantly intepreting, thinking, and acting as members of a learning
community." (p 101) Judy was thrilled to have alternative perspectives to compare
to her own perspectives as she worked with the teachers in making practical decisions
about advancing the students after retaining them and in interpreting the experiences
of the participants for her dissertation work.
Judy understood that an inquirer can not see and hear everything
! As humans, we learn to focus our attention and disregard sights and sounds that
we believe are less relevant to our focus. We don't notice temperatures or body
language or colors or whatever because we are concentrating on the implications of
what someone is saying or on the time we have left to talk or on a person's accent or on how
we are looking as a teacher, observer, or interviewer. Just recognizing our limitations
doesn't solve everything. We will still miss a lot of what is going on; but at least admission of this fact makes us humble and more teachable, which enhances the likelihood
that we will learn something-- the whole reason for being inquirers in the first
place. Judy demonstrated this realization by inviting the teachers to join her in
a team of researchers so she could learn from what they might hear or see. She also
acknowledged throughout her reports that what she was concluding was tentative and
based on this limited experience. She was willing to go to the literature to see
if others could help her. She made it clear that the students and their parents could teach
her a lot about the experience of retention.
Judy demonstrated that whatever inquirers see or hear is filtered
through their experiences, dispositions, biases, energy levels, relationships, roles,
time, other resource restrictions, and on and on. We do not just take reality in
but create our version of reality through the hearing and seeing experiences. Judy
provided some details about who she was and why she was doing this study that could help
us understand something about her filters. She acknowledged that she has dispositions
and roles that affect what she sees, hears, and thinks. It is easy to imagine that her study would be very different if she were Garry, Marné, or Kyleen. Her story
about these five students and the adults associated with them is her
story.
Judy's study is an example of the fact that the inquirer's presence makes a major
difference
in what it is possible to hear or see in others while you are there listening and
watching. The roles you are developing with people and your relationships with them
have something to do with this, but the roles they are playing and the nature of
the situation you are in makes a big difference too. If Judy had been a graduate student
from a neighboring university, she would have developed very different kinds of relationships
with the participants in this study; they would have told her a different story, and she would have heard a different story. Likewise, if she had been a fifth grade
teacher or a district curriculum specialist or an interested citizen and not
the assistant principal, she would have had a very different experience. The roles
she and the others played together would have changed. She would have heard and
seen different things and come up with a different story.
As an administrator, Judy was able to spend some time hanging around, getting to be part of the world she was inquirying
into
before she asked any specific questions. Give people a chance to get to know you
so they will be willing to let you get to know them
. This involves evolving a role in the situation that is legitimate from the participants'
point of view and that also puts you in a position to learn from them about their
ways of experiencing the world. Judy had a legitimate role from the beginning.
She had been a teacher and a assistant principal before she began this particular inquiry.
She had
been "hanging around" the school and was trusted by people with whom she was working.
When she talked to parents, they knew that she would be influential in retaining
or promoting their children. The teachers knew that she could move children from
their classroom to another if she chose to do so. Her role was legitimate and inside the
organization she was studying. This is generally the case for educators who decide
to become naturalistic inquirers. They are already insiders. Certainly, they can
choose to conduct inquiry outside the situations in which they are already insiders.
For example, a teacher could investigate the principal's office and activities or
the experiences of another teacher, even within the school and that would involve
some adjustment while they became part of the "world" outside their normal context. A good
place to begin doing naturalistic inquiry is within your world as it now exists so
you can build from the relationships and roles you have already established.
Although it is difficult to discern from her report, it is likely that Judy recorded as much detail as possible
. Particulars are essentiad to understanding and interpretation. As Hunter and Foley
(1976) note, the statement: "The woman behind the drugstore counter was angry," is
a label
, while the statement: "The woman behind the drugstore counter became red in the face,
began to tremble, gestured back and forth with a clenched right fist, spoke quickly
and much more loudly than she had been speaking," is a better description
. (Pp. 46-47 Rather than filter details into highly abstract labels for readers and
for your own later review, record the particulars in as much concrete detail as possible.
Such records will be much more useful to you and others in the long run. Also be very explicit about the questions you are asking at each step of the inquiry since
these questions reveal much about the filters you are using to sift the particulars
from the experience into your inquiry. It is difficult to see how well Judy did
this from the materials included in Appendix F. A review of her fieldnotes would help considerably.
The detailed stories she tells in Chapter 4 of her dissertation are evidence that
she did gather lots of particulars. She also presents there the specific questions she asked. These details are rarely presented in written reports because of
space restrictions. But each inquirer can certainly answer these questions about
detail and particulars in their own inquiries. Doing so will enhance the quality
of insights into the objects of study.
Observation Lessons
As others (Berendt, 1985 and Dillard, 1985) have noted, good observation includes all the physical senses
(particularly hearing and seeing, but also touch, smell, and taste), empathic human sensitivities, mastery of the language, and spiritual awareness
you are capable of using. Observation is a whole person activity. We listen and
watch for signals we can relate to our experiences, words, thoughts, and feelings.
Anything we can not relate to will probably be ignored. Do not discount any of
your abilities to perceive or be attuned to the experiences you are having and the experiences
of the people you are trying to understand (such as studefts, parents, other educators,
etc.). Whatever you can do to develop and strengthen your sensitivies, observation, and listening skills in all these dimensions will enhance your abilities to take
in valuable information quickly. Judy's first theme about the vulnerability of the
educators on the inquiry team and their responsiveness to the plight of the children
they were studying is evidence that she and they used their humanity to develop an empathic
understanding of the children. They were able to see more deeply into the experience
of the children as they listened to them and their parents, watched them with a desire to understand, and reviewed the children's records with a desire to hear messages
that were written between the lines of those records.
Observing as a participant-observer is different than observing as a participant only.
Spradley (1980) notes several differences between an ordinary participant (like
a teacher) and a participant observer (like a teacher-as-researcher). For instance,
he claims that participant observers not only participate in the appropriate activities
for the scene they are in, they also observe themselves and others engaging in activities
and note the context of the setting in which these activities take place. The participant
observer works carefully to overcome habits of inattention, bias, and simplification so their awareness is accutely greater than a regular participant. The participant
observer is also more introspective and thoughtful about the experience and goes
to the trouble of writing about what he or she is thinking.
Bogdan and Biklen (1982) discuss a continuum from total observer to total participant
and note that each inquiry requires the inquirer to find an appropriate role to play
along that continuum. Most educators who see themselves as inquirers begin from
the "total participant" end of the spectrum. But taking the inquiry seriously means you
will have to change your role and associated relationships with others somewhat.
You are not only a teacher or administrator in the school, you are someone who wants
to stand back from that experience in various ways and at different times to take stock
of what is going on and to comment on what you observe. The people you work with
may resast. You may find that this takes a lot of extra work. It is so easy to
stay in our patterns of behavior.
Judy found that as an assistant principal, she and others in the school agreed that
her participant role included lots of observation activity. She didn't look much
different from a regular "participant" assistant principal who walks around and watches
and listens. But Judy added several of the participant observer habits to her style.
She used that base to include teachers as part of her research team and built on
their natural opportunities tg observe. She invited them and herself to do a lot
more writing than they normally would have done as full participants, moving them more and
more toward the observer end of the participant-observer continuum.
Interviewing Lessons
Altbough much of what has been said about observation applies as well to interviewing,
most observation can be done without ever explicitly asking another person to answer
a question generated by the inquirer. The teacher can listen to the students ask
each other questions and learn much. Or an administrator can observe faculty members
conversing and sharing their insights without asking them anything. But sometimes
educators are in excellent positions to ask questions of one another and of students,
parents, or other participants in the inquiry setting. This is when interviewing becomes
useful. In the course of a naturalistic study, researchers usually conduct several
interviews with many different participants. These interviews range from formal,
tape-recorded interviews (sometimes following a pre-defined format) to informal "conversations"
in which the researcher takes no notes and does very little to direct the format
of the interview. It is through interviews that participants' perspectives are gathered most directly. Asking questions that will help them express those views requires
the several skills reviewed in this chapter.
Similar to the participant observer use of the natural participant role, the inquirer builds on natural conversational experiences to create a new kind of
conversation, the interview
. Spradley 1979) lists several differences between a friendly conversation and an
interview, suggesting that "It is best to think of ethnographic [naturalistic] interviews
as a series of friendly conversations into which the researcher slowly introduces
new elements to assist informants to respond as informants. Exclusive use of these
new ethnographic elements,
or introducing them too quickly, will make interviews become like a formal interrogation
[like the typical structured interview]. Rapport will evaporate, and informants
will discontinue their cooperation. At any time during the interview it is possible
to shift back to a friendly conversation. A few minutes of easygoing talk interspersed
here and there throughout the interview will pay enormous dividends in rapport."
(Pp. 58-59) Spradley then notes that unlike a typical friendly conversation, the
inquirer has more explicit purposes in carrying on the interview, asks most of the questions,
encourages the interviewee to do most of the talking, expresses interest and ignorance
more freely, repeats what is said to clarify what was meant more often, invites the interviewee to expand rather than abbreviate, and pauses to let the interviewee
think about what to say.
As you think about teachers interviewing students or administrators interviewing patrons,
it should be clear that doing an inquiry interview is very different than the typical
conversations educators have with people they need to understand (like their students and patrons). The inquirer can not be defensive about what is being said; you
must be open and willing to hear their views. It is not clear from the material
we have from Judy that she used all these elements in her interviews. But her findings
suggest that the people had a chance to tell her what they really thought and that indicates
that she probably used many of these tactics.
Interviewing adds a different kind of social dimension
to observation that goes beyond listening to them in their own conversations to asking
people to talk in response to your direct questions. Work your way into this new
activity by initiating the questions around common experiences you have shared during
observations. Ask your questions in the language you have heard your interviewees
using. Invite them to talk about the experiences without putting your
boundaries around their responses so they are able to define the questions they think
ought to be answered first. Spradley (1979) suggests you build rapport with interviewees
by letting people talk about whatever they want at first, then moving into an exploration of the relationship and what questions are okay to ask, then shifting into
a cooperation phase in which the interviewee values the inquiry as much as the inquirer
does and they are working together to teach the inquirer about the interviewee's
world and the interviewee helps originate questions rather than only respond to the
inquirer's questions.
For example, if Judy's first interview with a child had been a formal affair with
a tape recorder, sitting in chairs at a table and based on questions like, "How did
it feel to be retained a year?" or "How would you like to be advanced to second grade
next term?" I would predict that she would either get confused responses from the students
or they would simply say what they thought she wanted to hear. On the other hand,
if she were to watch them interacting in the classroom or out on the playground and
then informally talk to them in those same settings about what she saw them doing there,
they would be much more likely to talk to her from their own perspectives and in
their own ways and language. She would get information that comes from the participants rather than getting them to simply give her what they think she wants.
Keep asking for more details
and other insights from your interviewees without "putting words in their mouths."
Let them know both directly and by your non-verbal communication that you really
are their student when it comes to their own experiences and interpretations of those
experiences. Listen attentively and be interested. Let people say what they want to
say in the ways they want to speak. Watch how they are expressing themselves so
you can pick up on the 80% or more of their message that is communicated non-verbally.
Never presume to understand them before they have a chance to really explain themselves.
You may want to ask them to give you overviews or grand tours of their experience
(e.g., Judy might have asked the parents to give her an overview of their child's
life to that point) and then mini-tours (see Spradley, 1979 and 1980 for extensive use of
these procedures) to delve into issues discussed during the grand tour in greater
detail (e.g., Judy could then follow-up on a particular experience in the child's
life to probe into it for information regarding their grade retention experience). You may
ask them to give you examples and then ask more questions based on those real life
situations. The intent is to get them to do most of the talking and you do most
of the listening. They are the experts!
Judy's whole study was organized around the belief that the children and their parents
knew more about their experience of retention than did the educators who made the
decision to retain the children in first grade. She wanted the teachers and administration of the school to be silent in their professional authoritarian roles and to listen
to the people involved. Once again, the material in Appendix F does not provide
the details that demonstrate how this was done, but the preface to her dissertation
reveals the fact that Judy and her colleagues changed their views of retention dramatically
based on this experience. They learned something they did not know. They did not
just find confirmation for their own beliefs. They were willing to hear that they
were wrong.
Document Review Lessons
In addition to participant observation and interviewing, Bogdan and Biklen (1982)
have identified several other sources of information in educational settings that
are commonly used in naturalistic inquiry. There are usually a large number of documents
written by participants that are available to an educator in the school setting. The
main task for an educator turned inquirer is to identify, locate, and gain access
to such materials.
Be on the lookout for artifacts
, documents, photographs, records, and so on that are available in your inquiry setting
or that you, students, or others at your site could generate as part of their normal
activities. Consider anything that might be used to explore a different perspective on the questions your inquiry raises and the tentative answers you are reaching
through observations and interviews. Examples include journal entries by students
and other staff members, records of attendance and performance on assignments and
exams, video tapes and photographs of classroom interactions (produced by the inquirer or by
the participants the inquirer is trying to understand), letters sent home to parents,
portfolios of students' work, grade reports, logs teachers or others keep, official
statistics, and so on. These "documents" can provide independent checks on your own
perceptions and readings of what you hear and see. They are not necessarily more
accurate or correct than your observations and interviews. But when they confirm
your hunches, you will usually be more confident that you were listening and seeing insightfully.
If the conclusions you draw from existing records or documents counter your ideas
from other activities, you are more likely to look harder and listen more carefully
before making final choices. As an insider in your school, you are likely to have
access tg many of these documents as part of your responsibilities there. Be sure
to ask students and others for permission to read and share journal entries and other
private documents, even if you have access to them as a staff member.
Judy read journals kept by the teachers for her project, looked at assigned work the
students were generating during the period of the study, and reviewed the children's
cumulative records. She could have been more open in discussing how she used these
documents in this case; but she seemed to be reviewing them to see how closely they
independently supported her conclusions.
Any literature on the topic you are interested in can be viewed as documents
to include in your review. The documents do not have to be produced by people at
your site. Often, other teachers, administrators, or educational researchers are
dealing with some of the same issues as you. When you read accounts of their inquiries
and recommendations, summaries should go into your fieldnotes as you make mental connections
between the academic and practical worlds. Conducting your own research in your
educational setting can make you much more inquisitive about what others are doing
and saying about the same issues as you. Relating what you read to what you are finding
is a satisfying way to build confidence in your own inquiries. Judy had reviewed
the literature extensively in preparation for conducting her dissertation. This
literature turned out to be very relevant to what she observed and heard during data collection.
She also became aware of other literature sources during data collection and responded
to them in her reports. Using the literature is not often thought of as a data collection activity; but it serves that purpose well.
Lincoln and Guba (1985) note that other important sources of information which are
often overlooked are "unobtrusive informational residues
" which accumulate without anyone's intent that they be used as data. These can be
collected in the absence of the person(s) who created them (as archeologists collect
artifacts left by ancient cultures). The main challenge you face is discovering
residues in your own particular setting which might provide useful insight .
Lincoln and Guba give some examples of such traces that might be used by inquiring
educators: "shortcuts across lawns as indicators of preferred traffic patterns, .
. . worn and smudged condition of books as indicators of their use, number of discarded
liquor bottles as indicators of the level of alcoholism in an apartment complex, number
of cigarettes in an ashtray as an indicator of nervous tension, amount of paperwork
that accumulates in the "in" basket as an indicator of work load, number of books
in a personal library as an indicator of humaneness, presence of bulletin board displays
in a schoolroom as an indicator of the teacher's concern with children's creativity,
and many others."
Summary
These ideas about how to collect information apply to teachers as well as administrators,
to teacher educators as well as student teachers. Any educator who wants to be a
better inquirer or learner can use their role as insider participant to gain access
to activities and people that outsider researchers would have difficulty even knowing
about. Likewise, educators-as-inquirers can conduct informal and formal interviews
and use creativity in identifying artifacts, literature, and unobtrusive indicators
that will be serve as information sources.
Looking back to Chapters One through Six, it should be clear now that all the questions
discussed in Chapter Six can be asked in different ways through these various gathering
approaches. And the collection procedures you use will vary depending on the level of trust you have developed with people you want to observe or interview, as discussed
in Chapter Four. What you choose to record, as discussed in Chapter Three and your
assumptions about yourself as an inquirer and your relationship to what you are inquiring into also shape what and how you collect. The point is, that you are designing
your own study as you make all these choices and as you act out your beliefs as a
person. Remember to keep track of all these decisions in your audit trail so others
can decide how credible your work is.
Additional Readings
Berendt, Joachim-Ernst (1992). The third ear: on listening to the world.
New York: Henry Holt.
Bogdan, R. C. and Biklen, S. K. (1982). Qualitative Research for Education
, Allyn and Bacon
Boody, R. M. (1992). An examination of the philosophic grounding of teacher reflection
and one teacher's experience. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Brigham Young University,
Provo, UT.
Borg, W. R. and Gall, M. D. (1983). Educational research: an introduction
, New York: Longman.
Burgess, R. G. (Ed.! (1985). Issues in educational research: qualitative methods
. London: Falmer.
Dillard, A. (1985). Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
New York: Harper and Row.
Gay, L. R. (1987). Educational research: competencies for analysis and application.
Columbus, OH: Merrill.
Hehr, J. (1992). Moving ahead: a naturalistic study of retention reversal of five
elementary school children. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Brigham Young University,
Provo, UT.
Hunter, D. E. and Foley M. B. (1976). Doing anthropology2 a student-centered approach to cultural anthropology
, New York: Harper and Row.
Spradley, J. P. (1979). The ethnographic interview
, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Spradley, J. P. (1980). Participant observation
, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Douglas, J. D. (1985). Creative interviewin
g. Volume 159, Sage Library of Social Research. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. Questions for Consideration
1. Why is it important to observe yourself as the observer as well as to observe
the situation you want to study?
2. Do you agree that no two observers can ever observe exactly the same things?
What are the implications of this statement?
3. Do you agree that observing is a creative rather than a passive act? What are
the implications of this statement?
4. If we are selective in what we observe and in what we record based on those observations,
is there any such thing as objective data? What are the implications?
5. How can you discover the patterns of selectivity that you use in observing and
recording data?
6. Do you agree that information taken out of context is meaningless? What are the
implications for doing a study?
7. How can you pay more attention to context?
8. What is the difference between labeling and describing? How can you learn to
describe rather than label when recording your observations?
9. Why is nonverbal information just as important as verbal information? How can
you obtain both?
10. Why is emic information just as important as etic information? How can you obtain
both?
11. How do ordinary participants and participant observers differ from one another?
What are the implications for your own research project?
14. What are the different levels of involvement in which a participant observer can
engage?
15. Why does this presentation concentrate on descriptive observations?
16. How are observations and questions related?
a. If you are observing, rather than interviewing, of whom do you ask questions?
b. What kind of questions should you ask?
17. What are some differences between grand tour and mini tour observations and questions?
18. When should descriptive questions be asked in a naturalistic inquiry?
19. How often should a particular informant be interviewed?
20. How can interviewers encourage informants to reveal their emic perspectives rather
than use the researcher's etic views?
21. Why is it important to pay attention to the rapport process during interviewing?
Can't rapport be taken care of through gate keepers before even meeting with the
informants?
22. Why should a naturalistic inquirer try to go beyond interviews and direct observation
to gather the other kinds of data described in this chapter?
23. What are some possible documents, records, artifacts, etc. that might be available
to naturalistic researchers in educational settings?
24. How would you go about gathering such materials?
25. How would you combine the information gathered from such materials with the observation
and interview data you collect?
26. How could photographs and/or videotaping be used in studying educational problems?
27. Are the suggestions made in this chapter regarding photos and videotapes feasible
or would the people under study be too distracted by the equipment?
28. Are the ideas presented in this chapter applicable in your situation?
29. How are you using or planning to use the ideas in this chapter in your own naturalistic
inquiry project?
Suggested Activities
1. (This activity is adapted from Hunter and Foley (1976) As part of your study,
observe a social situatiof in the following ways:
During a 15 minute period, do not take any notes or attempt to record the situation
in any way.
During another 15 minutes, record your observations using paper and pencil while you
continue observing.
Based on this observation exercise, answer the following questions in your fieldnotes:
a. Where was the scene you observed?
b. Where were you in relation to the scene you observed?
c. Why did you choose the kind of scene you chose to observe?
d. Why did you chgose the particular scene you observed?
e. Attempt to recall and describe in writing your train of thought-- both about yourself
and the scene-- during the first 15 minutes you were observing (when you weren't
taking notes).
f. Did you move around? Stay still? Why?
g. Were you interested in the scene? Easily distracted? Both? Why? What are the
implications for what you saw?
h. Were you bored? How might that affect your observation?
i. Stop a moment. Think about the scene you observed. Did you notice the:
time?
temperature?
weather conditions?
materials of which things were made?
colors of materials?
clothes people wore?
sounds in the background (e.g., cars going by)?
person speaking each phrase?
people's positions in relationship to one another?
way people moved their bodies?
gestures?
spatial arrangements of people and objects?
Answer these questions. Then try to think of other items to which you now know you
did not pay attention. Include these items with the list above.
j. What things about the situation can you remember now that you didn't record
in writing during the second 15 minutes of your observation activity? Make a list
of those items too.
k. Carefully review the two lists in "i" and "j" above. What kinds of things are
on the
lists. What kinds of things do you tend to overlook when you are observing? When
you are recording your observations? Why do you think you didn't record or observe
these things? What similarities and differences there are in your observation
and recording selectivities.
2. Select one situation you want to study as part of your project and write out a
series of questions that will lead to both grand tour observations and mini-tour
observations for that small project. With these questions in mind, conduct a period
of participant observation in which you make both grand tour observations and mini-tour observations.
Write an expanded account of these descriptive observations in your fieldnotes.
3. Review the examples given in this chapter of the various kinds of descriptive
questions and prepare several of each type for informants in your project setting.
4. Conduct an interview with an informant, using descriptive questions and taking
condensed notes during or immediately after the interview.
5. Expand the condensed notes taken during the interview into full fieldnotes.
6. Write about this interview in your audit trail.
a. Did the interview have an explicit purpose? What was it?
b. Did you give any explanations to the informant regarding the purpose of the interview,
the fact that responses were being recorded, that native language was needed, the
kinds of questions that were being asked, etc.?
c. Were descriptive questions asked? If so, which of the five types described in
this chapter were used and how useful were they?
d. Did you do most of the asking and the informant most of the answering? Who did
most of the talking?
e. Did you express interest and/or cultural ignorance in what the informant was saying?
How?
f. Did you repeat back what the informant was saying to show understanding of the
responses?
g. Did you repeat questions several times to give the informant plefty of opportunity
to say all they wanted?
h. Did the informant expand or abbreviate what he or she was saying? What did you
do to do encourage expansion?
i. Did you ask friendly questions, especially at the beginning of the interview?
Were the greetings and ending comments appropriate?
7. You should think about the naturalistic project you are conducting in terms of
the ideas presented in this chapter to identify existing documents, records, or unobtrusive
residues you might use to gather data. Make a list of such artifacts, pick at least one item from the list that you need, and obtain access to it. Summarize information
from that data source into your fieldnotes.
8. You should also think about how you might appropriately use photographs, audiotapes
and/or videotapes in your project. How would you use these techniques and for what
purposes?