Adam Russell
Professor DeVries
English 5870
23 January 2009
Commentary #1
The Fine Balance between Participant and Observer
Last Saturday’s episode of Law & Order: SVU contained a plot device where a stripper is interrogated for a brutal attack on a “client” that was left to die in Central Park. As the detectives continued to ask her questions and implicate her in the assault, she got around to revealing her innocence by stating that she is really an ethnographic researcher who is conducting a field study on the life of strippers by becoming one. In the process of immersing herself in the world of erotic services, she’s suffered numerous legal and personal consequences that have become the collateral damage to her research. In Purcell-Gates’ article, she talks about the roles that ethnographers must fill if their goal is to conduct accurate research. She writes that ethnographic research “involves intimate, face-to-face interaction with participants [and] uses inductive, interactive, and recursive data collection and analytic strategies to build local cultural theories” (93). Although there are numerous roles that ethnographers partake in to conduct their studies, the most effective comes from the individuals who immerse themselves in the culture they are researching, but like the “stripper” in Law & Order, there can be undesirable consequences.
Purcell-Gates’ article reminded me of the internship class where I spent 23 hours observing a professor at Modesto Junior College. While I was there, I regularly sat with a group of students and got to know them. Most of them were in their early 20s (or younger), and were taking the class as a way to fulfill English requirements. I played the role of both the kindly and unobtrusive ethnographer, but at the same time, they did not know that I was there to observe them and the class. My relationship with these students was created under false pretenses: they thought I was just another student. We would joke around, talk about social related topics (I had to adjust to the culture I was corresponding to because most of the students were 10 or more years younger than me…I had to remember what it was like to talk like 20 year old), and I established casual friendships with males and females. This “letting in” to their social click allowed me the face-to-face interaction that Purcell-Gates stresses in order to access their opinions of the class and the professor. Of course, the students’ opinions and experiences varied based on the individual, but because I was accepted into their group, they talked to me in a candid and open manner and not in the role of a student addressing a teacher. During this time, I remembered what it was like to be a young student. Observing them interact within the culture of the class showed me the extent of my disconnection from students from my many years of being in front of the class, rather than sitting with them.
Near the end of my observation time, the professor allowed me to teach a lesson on the film Psycho (it was an English class that used film as the primary medium). When the professor introduced me and I proceeded to explain that I was a teacher who is observing the class to fulfill the requirements of a Master’s program, I noticed a look of surprise in the students I associated with. This was the first time they found out that I was not a student and their looks and body language indicated a certain level of surprise and, to a lesser degree, betrayal. It was a fine line that I had to draw when I entered the class. I wanted to see what it was like from the student’s perspective, but part of the experience is teaching as well. Fortunately, I used my social experience with the small sect of students to gauge the rest of my audience and cater my lesson to them, but afterwards, my correspondence with the group of students (which was quite regular) became sparse. I guess there are consequences when the ethnographer becomes a participant, but in the end, it made my teaching more effective because I truly knew my audience instead of assuming I knew them.
This is a great observation, connected to both popular media and personal experience, and demonstrates clearly that you know what you are talking about. Again, I like the crisp prose style as well. I saw a a popular crime drama a while back, can’t remember specifically which show, or maybe it was a movie, in which one of the major players was a sociology graduate student, doing ethnography of the participant observer kind for their dissertation, studying gang culture, and ended up engaged in drug dealing and murder as a consequence of that research.
I have also read a couple of ethnographic studies in which the researchers were pressured by police to give testimony, or information to law enforcement based on their participant observer status. Some of them chose to do so, and others went to jail for contempt of court to protect their sources. I’d like to think I’d have the strength of character for the latter choice, but I have been to jail on more than one occasion and it does not agree with me, so I don’t know. Researching classrooms however is typically much safer, so I will probably not ever have to make that choice.