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Watching, Listening, and Interacting

Published on Dec 01, 2015

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PRESENTATION OUTLINE

Watching, Listening, and Interacting

Conducting participant observation
Photo by mrhayata

Key Elements

  • Access to the location of the human experience you wish to study
  • Building rapport with participants
  • Spending enough time to obtain needed data

Participant observation can capture

  • rules and norms that are taken for granted by experienced participants or cultural insiders
  • Routine actions and social calculations that happen below the level of conscious thought

Benefits of Participant Observation

  • Addressing problems that are simply unavailable to other data collection techniques
  • Reduces the problem of reactivity (ideally)
  • Helps shape interview questions
  • Lessen reporting biases
  • Observing behavior in its physical context
Photo by tedeytan

Potential Drawbacks

  • Potentially and unpredictably time consuming
  • Highly “practitioner-sensitive”; difficult to generalize from
  • Your audience may not respect/understand it
Photo by snacktime2007

Getting Started

  • Where does the activity of interest occur? Is it always in the same place(s), or does it move around? If there is more than one possible location, is one more representative/important than another? Will you need to visit multiple sites?
  • Is the phenomenon of interest time specific, or is it always there?
  • Will you need to visit multiple sites?
Photo by MrOmega

General Things to Observe

  • Appearance
  • Verbal behavior and interactions
  • Personal space
  • Human traffic
  • People who stand out
Photo by Neo_II

Formulate a hypothesis

Photo by Nanagyei