Study notes Learning in the Field chapter 7

Interviewing observing and studying material culture are the primary ways to discover and learn in the field. Interviewing includes talking with participants both formally and informally. Observing includes formal structured noting of events, activities, and speech and participant observation. Gathering aspects of material culture includes artifacts and written material that may be available in or about the setting or about individuals. The ways of learning about phenomenon and setting are referred to as methods or techniques. Interviewing requires good observing skills. They go together in a qualitative study. Collecting data is not passive. Observations signal participants' emotions, attention and interest, authenticity and fatigue. Data is collected through observing, interviewing, and documenting material culture. Qualitative researchers capture and represent the richness, texture, and depth of what they study. Decisions about data gathering are reflected in the following questions: Is the project an evaluation, action research or a descriptive study? What are the researcher's assumptions about reality and knowledge claims? Is the work ethnography, a phenomenological study, or a sociolinguistic one? How do actions and reactions of participants shape what is possible, desirable, and ethical? Qualitative researchers decide how deeply or broadly to employ data-gathering techniques. Gathering data from a large number of participants yields information from many perspectives; this gives the study breadth. Focusing on a few participants in contrast encourages an in-depth understanding not possible with a larger sample. Prefigured techniques carefully specify interview questions or closely structure observations. The researcher can modify questions as they go through the project, but the questions should essentially remain the same as planned. Open-ended designs allow observations and interviews to be more holistic and exploratory than prefigured techniques. Ebb and Flow: A final decision is the mix of techniques. This mix too is forecast in the study's design and may change over the course of the research.
People see, hear, smell, taste, and touch as natural activities of every day life. What differentiates systematic qualitative inquiry from these everyday activities is purpose and discipline. Skills involved in gathering data are skills we use everyday: asking questions, listening looking, and reading. When employed in a research project, these sense-making activities are used more diligently and systematically. They are dictated by purpose and discipline. They are used to capture actions, words, and artifacts-data- so that they may scrutinize these data to learn about social phenomena.
During the data gathering, the researcher's challenge is to build a foundation for whatever findings or conclusions are drawn. If you claim to know something as a result of your research, data must exist to support those claims. In recording data, ask yourself the following questions: What do you observe and why? What questions do you ask and why? What changes in the preliminary design do you make and why? What preconceptions and prejudices are shaping your project? What problems do you encounter? How does your membership in particular social groups shape the research? Because qualitative inquiry happens in a natural environment, the discipline to document findings and procedures systematically and thoroughly is even more essential than in a laboratory or experiment. Data gathering is a deliberate, conscious, systematic process that details both the products-the data- and the processes of the research activities so that others may understand how the study was conducted and judge its adequacy, strength and ethics. You interview because you want to understand individual perspectives, to probe or clarify, to deepen understanding, to generate rich and descriptive data, to gather insights into participants thinking, and to learn more about the context. Deeper understandings develop through the dialogue of long, in-depth interviews, as interviewer and participants "coconstruct" meaning. Interviewing takes you into participants' worlds. Informal interviews are serendipitous. Occurring while you hang around a setting or as you are entering a home to conduct a more formal interview. These are casual conversations, incidental to social interactions. The interview guide approach is typically used in qualitative studies. The purpose of guided interviews is to elicit the participants' worldview. The researcher develops categories or topics to explore but remains open to pursuing topics that the participant brings up. The research poses open-ended questions followed by requests for elaboration; the participant responds with long narratives.
Phases of the interview: introduction-overview and purpose, informed consent, tape recording, ownership of content; Body of the interview- themes or topics, elaborations, transitions and summaries; Summary and closure-thanks, keeping the door open, review process for sharing transcript, next steps.
Standardized open-ended interviews are tightly prefigured having fixed questions that are asked of all participants in a particular order. Dialogic interviews are true conversations in which researcher and participant together develop a more complex understanding of the topic. There is authentic give and take in these interviews, mutual sharing of perspectives and understandings. Seen as conversation with a purpose, the interview yields a narrative. Both parties' social group identities either ease conversation or make it tricky.
Follow up questions allow you to ask for more detail, hoping to discover the deeper meaning of things or more concrete examples. The strength of an interview comes from the relevance of the interview questions and from your skill in asking follow-up questions. Open-ended elaborations provide more detail. Open-ended clarification allows for rephrasing and implying that more detail will help you to understand. Detailed elaborations provides information such as timing of events, interactions and roles, physical environment, locations, and people present.
Ethnographic researchers interview participants about culture, phenomenological researchers search to define lived experiences through dialogic interviews, and socio-communication researchers try to elicit speech events that are relevant to their topics of interest. Case study researchers seek a balance between the emic and etic perspectives. Elite and focus group interviews are also used. Ethnographic interviews are thematic or topical in structure. Phenomenological interviews assume that shared experiences have an effable structure and essence. Interviewing elicits people's stories about their lives. Interviews may be used as a means for exploring and gathering experiential narrative material. The interview may be used as a vehicle to develop a conversational relation with an interviewee about the meaning of an experience. Seidman calls for 3 Interviews: 1. the focused life history, 2. the details of experience and 3. reflection on meaning.
Socio-communications interviews are discourse analysis and semiotics. They rely on text as a major source of data, although sociolinguistics may gather data through interviews. Silverman distinguishes between text and interview data: Texts are data consisting of words and images that have become recorded without the intervention of a researcher whereas interviews frequently result in transcriptions, text, that has been produced through researcher intervention.
Observation: We observe to understand the context, to see tacit patterns, to see patterns people are unwilling to talk about, to provide direct personal experience and knowledge, to move beyond the selective perceptions of both researcher and participants. We should observe the social system: formal and/or informal patterns of interaction, ways people organize themselves, tacit rules in operation, recurring events, and down time; We also should observe activities and actions: full sequence of events, time sampling, rituals and ceremonies, crises, and unplanned activities. Writing field notes to record your observations in critical. It provides a written record. You should write descriptively and include where you observe, who was there and not there, what happened, when events happened and why events took place. You should also include specific and concrete details and use evocative adjectives, action verbs and avoid evaluative language. Be specific and then be even more specific. As soon as possible write up the raw field notes. Put your notes into the computer and elaborate on skimpy notes. Include thick, rich descriptions. You also study material culture. Material culture might include objects such as schoolwork or other types of documents. The analysis of do material culture is called content analysis.