SOCI 3700 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Participant Observation, Ethnography, Deeper Understanding

• School: University of Georgia
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOCI 3700
• Professor: Edgemon

Document Summary

We"ve talked about these four roles already: The most common role used by field researchers is participant and observer. However, this may not involving revealing yourself as a researcher specifically. This may difficult and you may need to immerse yourself in the field in order to narrow your ideas. The most difficult and hard-to-predict aspect of fieldwork is the path from a broad topic or site to a research question and then to an answer. Sites where people face challenges and hardships are fertile ground for research. Interacting with subjects: interactions with other people in the field become a major source of knowledge and data, as well as a source of potential ethical dilemmas. May want to know about conflicts happening in the field. Good to start with a high status person, but may have ramifications. For a true ethnography the first few weeks can be extremely challenging. Many different views regarding relationships with participants.