Adam Russell

Getting Familiar with the Subject

When Brueggemann took the assignment at Gallaudet University, she decided to exist between the two roles of participant-observer and occupy what she called the hyphenated world.  Through this process, Brueggemann created a third reality that consisted of herself, the subjects, and her formal observations.  The natives of Gallaudet looked at her with a level of mistrust because of how they were to be represented through this third reality.  At the same time, she crossed an ethical boundary when she decided to present herself as a complete novice in the field of deaf education.  She deliberately presented a falsehood to faculty and students to “illustrate from the outset that [she] was aware and sensitive to most of the issues surrounding deaf education […] and as a nonjudgmental, somewhat objective and distanced observer” (24).  However, by occupying this hyphenated world, she came to a moral dilemma of foregoing honesty in the name of objectivity, and her teaching suffered because she had to stay with the original role she created.    

When I was a senior in college, I had to take a Psychology class to fulfill my education requirements.  It was Adolescent Psychology, and one of the major tasks was to interview an adolescent and write a case study about their development.  This was a problem because as a 22 year college student, I didn’t know any preteens or early teens (I suspect that most students in the class didn’t unless they had a younger sibling).  However, I did have a 29 year old roommate who answered questions about his adolescence.  I wrote a rather detailed case study about his psychological development and, as were the directions, gave a diagnosis of the influences in his life and how they affected his character and personality.  After it was graded and returned to me, I asked my roommate if he wanted to read it.  For a second he looked like he wanted to, but then he promptly refused; he claimed he didn’t want to go anywhere near it.   At first I didn’t know why he wouldn’t want to read a psychological evaluation (albeit a hack observation), but then I realized that not only would I be subjecting him to my personal analysis of his character, but that there were issues that he did not want to read a formal analysis.  Similar to Brueggemann, I had a level of familiarity with my test subject. 

When I look back on this event, I realize that it was that level of familiarity that most likely prevented my roommate from wanting to read my case study of him.  But, at the same time, it was that familiarity that allowed me into his world in the first place.  I believe that Brueggemann experienced the same dilemma with her two subjects Anna and Charley.  When she was with them, she traversed the hyphenated world and, by going native, was able to access their world. However, when the time came for her to evaluate them in relation to how they fit into the larger system, she presented the third reality that, in their mind, betrayed their trust and exploited their friendship.  The most telling of this is when her friend Anna did not respond to her when she sent her final analysis.  Brueggamann conducted research that eventually led to her dissertation and a good amount of information on the institution.  But in doing so, she lost the valuable relationships that gave her the material in the first place.

This is the ultimate ethical dilemma of participant-observer ethnographic research.  How can we be participants and observers, and not objectify our subjects?  Brueggemann acknowledged that people’s situations are far more complicated and dynamic than anything that can be put down in an ethnographic observation.  The same awkwardness that was experienced between me and my roommate, was the same feelings of betrayal between Brueggemann and the ones that gave her access; they realized that in her evaluation they were reduced to a test subject to prove a larger point.  Perhaps there is no solution if one is to conduct proper research.  As soon as the researcher puts their experience to paper and creates the third reality, it seems almost unavoidable to reduce people’s situations and experiences to a case study or statistic which barely scratches the surface of who they are.  All we can do as researchers is try to be accurate and be mindful of the fact that we are representing human beings and not test subjects.