Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the fields, plant the seeds, irrigate the soil, and pick the fruits in the kibbutz;
study with the Hasidim; and bargain every day with the Arab merchants to
understand and record these very different ways of life. Working with people,
day in and day out, for long periods of time is what gives ethnographic research
its validity and vitality.
Given time, people forget their “company” behavior and fall back into
familiar patterns of behavior. Ethnographic research in one's own culture may
not require as much time to reach this point as ethnographic work in a foreign
culture: Language and customs are familiar, and the researcher is already an
insider in many respects. Sometimes a familiar setting is too familiar, however,
and the researcher takes events for granted, leaving important data unnoticed
and unrecorded.
In applied settings, participant observation is often noncontinuous and
spread out over an extended time. For example, in two ethnographic studies,
one of dropouts and the other of gifted children, I visited the programs for only
a few weeks every couple of months during a 3-year period. The visits were
intensive and included classroom observation, nonstop informal interviews,
occasional substitute teaching, interaction with community members, and the
use of various other research techniques, including long-distance phone calls,
dinner with students' families, and time spent hanging out in the hallways and
parking lot with students cutting classes.
Participant observation requires close, long-term contact with the people
under study. In the two cases discussed previously, the time period was 3 years.
Often, contract research budgets or time schedules do not allow long periods of
study—continuous or noncontinuous. In these situations, the researcher can
apply ethnographic techniques to the study but cannot conduct an ethnography.
Similarly, observation without participation in other people's lives may involve
ethnographic methods but is not ethnography. Nonparticipant observation may
take such forms as watching a school basketball game as part of data collection.
Applying ethnographic techniques and nonparticipant observation are accept-
able forms of research, but labeling the research method correctly is important.
The process may seem complicated, but a good ethnographer starts with the
basics. Participant observation begins with the first question—even as simple a
question as
Apho ha bait shemush?
(Where is the bathroom?). Finding the bath-
room or kerosene for a heater can help the researcher understand a community's
geography and resources. Slowly but surely, the questions become more refined
as the researcher learns what questions to ask and how to ask them.
In any case, the acquisition of ethnographic knowledge and understanding
is a cyclical process. It begins with a panoramic view of the community, closes
in to a microscopic focus on details, and then pans out to the larger picture
again—but this time with new insight into minute details. The focus narrows
