Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
about him before that. The reaction led me to understand another side or
dimension to the director. They loved and respected him, but they also hated
him for being a taskmaster, enforcing all the school rules. I needed to investi-
gate this response further through follow-up interviews and various cross-
checks. However, the slide provided the first glimmer into this aspect of the
student-director relationship that made him successful—“caring but firm.”
Simply taking a picture can be a projective technique. I take pictures in
almost all my studies. How an individual responds to the camera as I focus the
lens often characterizes an individual. Shy, bold, or sexy postures are all telling.
A casual discussion about movies, television shows, the police, or almost any
topic can be a projective technique for a skillful and attentive ethnographer. As
a teacher and a researcher in an inner-city high school, I used dreams as pro-
jective techniques. I asked students about their dreams and the dreams of others
and then asked them what they meant. Their dreams of being cornered in a
classroom and trapped in the principal's office closely paralleled their feelings
of being imprisoned in school. (In exchange for their openness, I often provided
a classic Freudian or a pragmatic Adlerian interpretation of their dreams. They
enjoyed these interpretations primarily for their entertainment value.)
Projective techniques, however revealing, rarely stand alone. The researcher
needs to set these techniques in a larger research context to understand elicited
responses completely. Projective techniques can be cues that can lead to fur-
ther inquiry or can be one of several sources of information to support an
ongoing hypothesis. Only the ethnographer's imagination limits the number of
possible projective techniques. However, the fieldworker should use only those
tests that can be relevant to the local group and the study.
ADDITIONAL ELICITING DEVICES
A variety of other tools are available with which the fieldworker can elicit the
insider's classification and categorization of a target culture. Ethnographers
ask participants to rank-order people in their community to understand the var-
ious social hierarchies. The semantic differential technique (Osgood, 1964)
elicits an insider's rating of certain concepts. For example, a respondent is
asked to rate rock music on a five-point Likert-type scale (excellent, good,
neutral, bad, and awful). (The fieldworker and native share the same defini-
tions of these ratings.) The native or participant is then asked to rate a variety
of other concepts. The fieldworker can compare this individual's ratings with
those of others in the community to produce a picture of how the group thinks
about certain issues. The fieldworker can thus identify patterns and statistical
